Can't boot since upgrade to 2.6.20-2

plus_M · 2007-02-14 22:28:48

I'm not entirely sure what the problem was, as a few things preceded this incident, so I will start from the time I last successfully booted and describe everything odd that happened thereafter. During my last successful boot I had installed the new kernel 2.6.20-2. 2.6.20-1 had been working perfectly for me, so I thought that 2.6.20-2 couldn't be any worse. After that I shut down, and the next day I booted into Windows. My partitions are organized in this manner: 1 300 GB PATA hard drive partitioned into 1 25 GB NTFS partition for the Windows XP installation, and 1 250ish GB ext3 partition for the archlinux installation. I do not have seperate mountpoints for /boot or /home, because at the time I had installed it I didn't realize that was necessary or helpful. I also have 1 250GB SATA hard drive that has a 10 GB partition at the end in FAT32 for sharing between the two OSs and the rest is partitioned NTFS. In Windows I have installed ext2 IFS, so that I can mount the ext3 partition and access.
This is the part where I begin to wonder what exactly caused the trouble. The following may be relevant or totally unrelated; I am not sure. I have an iPod. I wanted to see if I could install podzilla on my iPod, so I went to the podzilla website and downloaded the Windows podzilla installer for the iPod. This automatically detecs the iPod and attempts to install podzilla on it. After running it twice, and having it error out soon after entering the partitioning phase both times, where it needs to create a new partition for the linux installation on it, I was afraid I had bricked my iPod. So I shut down my computer and checked out my iPod, and it was functioning perfectly. I started up my computer again and this time tried to boot into Linux. This is what happened:

Attempting to create root device '/dev/hda2'
ERROR: Failed to parse block device name for '/dev/hda2'
    unknown
ERROR: root fs cannot be detected.  Try using the rootfstype= kernel parameter.
:: Initramfs completed - control passing to kinit
IP-Config: No devices to configure
kinit: Unable to mount root fs on device dev(0,0)
kinit: init not found!
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

There were some things before that, but nothing I thought of as especially important. If needed I can more. I tried it with the rootfstype=ext3 in the grub loader, and the same error occured, except starting at IP-Config: No devices to configure instead of earlier. I was able to boot into the system using the 0.7.2 install cd with the command "vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2", but with the 2.6.16 kernel, so none of the modules loaded. One of the important modules that was not able to load was the wireless card's driver. So I brought my computer over to an ethernet line and tried again, which once again failed for some reason. At this point I booted into a Sabayon and chrooted into my /dev/hda2 (which, strangely enough, in Sabayon was located at /dev/sdb2. Yes, I tried changing the grub loader configuration to saying root=/dev/sdb2 and root=/dev/sda2, but the same error occured as /dev/hda2). I commented out testing from my pacman.conf, because I figured that I wasn't going to have this happen again, and manually downgraded every package I had that was in testing to current. Restart, boot into archlinux, same error. I then did the same thing as before, except ran grub-install /dev/hda. Shutdown, reboot, same error.
At this point I'm not entirely sure what to do or what caused the problem. I half suspect that it was the kernel, and I half suspect that it was the ipod podzilla installer screwing up detection. I am totally clueless as to what to try next. Any ideas would be appreciated. If you need me to clarify anything, please ask. And sorry for the huge amount of text, but I felt I would be better served being complete and lengthy than not giving enough details.

Last edited by plus_M (2007-02-14 22:30:00)

noriko · 2007-02-15 08:36:20

well u might wanna try doing what it suggests
chances are that u'll run into trouble after .. but u gotta take it one step at a time.
at the boot menu, press `e`
then using the arrow keys.. go to the kernel line, and press `e` then add, `rootfstype=[ur root file system,i.e jfs,xfs,ext4dev]`, press return |[enter]; then press `b` ...

plus_M · 2007-02-15 22:00:45

noriko wrote:

well u might wanna try doing what it suggests

I did.

plus_M wrote:

I tried it with the rootfstype=ext3 in the grub loader, and the same error occured, except starting at IP-Config: No devices to configure instead of earlier.

I wrote a lot because I did a lot of things before posting this. I don't want to be rude to the people who I am asking for help from, but please read everything I read before suggesting something, as there is a chance I have already tried it. Please don't take offense.

Someone on IRC suggested I download and burn 0.8.0 and try to boot into it using that, and I have downloaded the ISO and am going to burn it now to test that idea. If it succeeds I will post again and describe what I did.

--edit

Well I was able to use the 0.8.0 cd to chmod into my archlinux partition, and from there modprobe my wireless driver and nvidia driver. So now I have internet and X, but a lot of stuff isn't working (as expected). At this point I am not sure what to do, however. I don't know what's wrong with my system, so I don't know how to fix it. I'm going to play around with this a bit and see if I can get anything done, but suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Last edited by plus_M (2007-02-15 23:46:03)

funkmuscle · 2007-02-16 13:35:25

Had the same issue after upgrading to 2.6.20. I've always ran more than one kernel in case of that exact issue.
anyway, my fix was to run mkinitcpio from a bootable kernel and point it to 2.6.20, not 2.6.19 or 17 or whatever earlier main kernel I was running, I use lilo so I re-ran it or...well /sbin/lilo.
That fixed the error.
Pc now boots.

dimi · 2007-02-16 14:21:39

I had this problem, too. Don't know anything about this, but what helped in my case was to simply remove the "x" in the image file name in the initrd line.

E.g. changing

initrd /boot/kernel26x.img

to

initrd /boot/kernel26.img

Sounds stupid? All I can say is that it's working for me...
Hope this helps you.

noriko · 2007-02-16 14:38:01

ERROR: root fs cannot be detected. Try using the rootfstype= kernel parameter.

if you tried what u said, u would get a different error, what is/was it ?
btw, i think the fs name might be ext3fs, not ext3

plus_M · 2007-02-16 21:49:54

Well I fixed my problem. Last night while I was chrooted into hda2, I did a pacman -Syu and made sure it downgraded everything to current. After that it booted, but when starting the network the kernel panicked. In the end I just ended up building kernel26, madwifi, and nvidia from abs and installing them. After that my system worked again. I'm not entirely sure what the problem was, but I'm betting it's something related to what funkmuscle said. Anyway problem solved.

Arch Linux

#1 2007-02-14 22:28:48

Can't boot since upgrade to 2.6.20-2

#2 2007-02-15 08:36:20

Re: Can't boot since upgrade to 2.6.20-2

#3 2007-02-15 22:00:45

Re: Can't boot since upgrade to 2.6.20-2

#4 2007-02-16 13:35:25

Re: Can't boot since upgrade to 2.6.20-2

#5 2007-02-16 14:21:39

Re: Can't boot since upgrade to 2.6.20-2

#6 2007-02-16 14:38:01

Re: Can't boot since upgrade to 2.6.20-2

#7 2007-02-16 21:49:54

Re: Can't boot since upgrade to 2.6.20-2

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