Arch Linux

sH

Member

From: Braunschweig, Germany

Registered: 2007-05-02

Posts: 145

New Kernel panics, restore old kernel fails

After the recent "pacman -Syu" I had a kernel Panic.

So I followed the wiki and booted the live-CD, chrooted in my system and restored an old kernel
with "pacman -U"

I successfully got the old kernel back. But this one won't boot either.

Loading root filesystem module...
Attempting to create root device name for '/dev/sda6'
unknown
ERROR: root fs cannot be detected. Try using the rootfstype=kernel parameter

Waiting for device to settle...done
Root device '/dev/sda6' doesn`t exist, attempting to create it
ERROR: Failed to parse block device name for '/dev/sda6'
ERROR: Unable to create/detect root device '/dev/sda6'
Dropping to a recovery shell
NOTE: klibc contains no 'ls' binary
.
.
.
ramfs$

What can I do? Or is my vacation to arch linux over now?

Thanks
sH

Last edited by sH (2007-08-14 18:16:06)

Ramses de Norre

Member

From: Leuven - Belgium

Registered: 2007-03-27

Posts: 1,289

Re: New Kernel panics, restore old kernel fails

Well, did you do what the error message suggests, defining the rootfstype parameter on your kernel line? I had to do this from the first 2.6.22 kernel to be able to boot. If you use grub you just add rootfstype=ext3 to your kernel line in your menu.lst (of course you need to replace ext3 by your actual filesystem). I guess you need to do a similar thing if you use lilo but I don't know the details about that.

sH

Member

From: Braunschweig, Germany

Registered: 2007-05-02

Posts: 145

Re: New Kernel panics, restore old kernel fails

Yes, I tried that, but it didn't help.

Acid7711

Member

From: Chicago, IL

Registered: 2006-08-18

Posts: 300

Website

Re: New Kernel panics, restore old kernel fails

Wow this sure is a common error msg lately.  Post up grub's menu.lst

kishd

Member

Registered: 2006-06-14

Posts: 401

Re: New Kernel panics, restore old kernel fails

sH, If you boot with the arch install cd does /dev/sda6 exist? It may be that your root system has another label.

---

---for there is nothing either good or bad, but only thinking makes it so....
Hamlet, W Shakespeare

sH

Member

From: Braunschweig, Germany

Registered: 2007-05-02

Posts: 145

Re: New Kernel panics, restore old kernel fails

sH, If you boot with the arch install cd does /dev/sda6 exist? It may be that your root system has another label.

Yes, I needed to do a

mount /dev/sda6 /mnt
chroot /mnt

to get the old kernel back. So /dev/sda6 was mountable, everything went fine with "pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/kernel26xxxxx" No error messages there. So that is why I am surprised that it still does not work.

sH

Member

From: Braunschweig, Germany

Registered: 2007-05-02

Posts: 145

Re: New Kernel panics, restore old kernel fails

Wow this sure is a common error msg lately.  Post up grub's menu.lst

I will do it, when I am home. But it is really nothing special there besides a vga=795 in the kernel line

The difference between your problem in the other thread and mine is, that I only used standard kernel and standard stuff.
Absolutely no custom experiments. I guess that is not what should happen with normal "pacman -Syu"

Last edited by sH (2007-08-15 08:38:52)

kishd

Member

Registered: 2006-06-14

Posts: 401

Re: New Kernel panics, restore old kernel fails

sH, How many hard disks do you have in your computer? I have had similar problems when for some unknown reason my primary hard disk became the secondary (sda became sdb) it could also be a grub configuration problem where grub is pointing to the wrong hd.

---

---for there is nothing either good or bad, but only thinking makes it so....
Hamlet, W Shakespeare

Acid7711

Member

From: Chicago, IL

Registered: 2006-08-18

Posts: 300

Website

Re: New Kernel panics, restore old kernel fails

Yeah, it's late here so I'll take a peak at it tomorrow. I battled this damn error for weeks until getting pissed at it. It's a problem with mkinitcpio from what I've learned and gathered on my own here.  A properly configured kernel shouldn't need one of these images, so you'll more than likely be able to get around it by compiling your own kernel from scratch if your comfortable doing that.  That's how I got around it for customer kernels.

sH

Member

From: Braunschweig, Germany

Registered: 2007-05-02

Posts: 145

Re: New Kernel panics, restore old kernel fails

OK, this is what has worked for me:

Put in the Arch CD-Rom
Boot from the CD with arch root=/dev/sda6
mkinitcpio -p kernel26
reboot

Dont know why but works

Acid7711

Member

From: Chicago, IL

Registered: 2006-08-18

Posts: 300

Website

Re: New Kernel panics, restore old kernel fails

Well glad you sorted it out, I'm guessing mkinitcio is missing some modules or something that the booting from the cd has.