Arch Linux

calef13

Member

Registered: 2007-06-10

Posts: 142

kernel panic with two sata hard disks connected

Hi,

I recently have been having trouble with a sata disk in my server I use for storing media which kept switching off. So I decided to pop it into my desktop to see if it functions ok there. In my desktop comp I have a sata II 250GB disk and the server disk is a sata II 1TB disk. I dual boot windows and linux off the 250GB disk and it works fine, but when I plug the server disk in. My linux install will not boot, even the fallback image fails. Arch stops with a kernel panic just after starting udev when mounting partitions, with the following complaint

:: Running Hook [filesystems]
:: Loading root filesystem module...
Attempting to create root device '/dev/sda3'
/bin/mknod "/dev/root" b 8 3
/init: 1: cannot open /dev/root: No such device or address

Waiting for devices to settle...done.
:: Initramfs Completed - control passing to kinit
IP-Config: no devices to configure
Waiting 0 s before mounting root device...
kinit: Unable to mount root fs on device dev(8,3)
kinit: init not found!
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Windows works fine however, so I am led to believe this is not a slave/master problem as then windows would not boot, which leads me to believe I need to configure the boot of my arch system somewhere. I remember reading something about static partitions in fstab on the dev mailing list, although that was from a discussion about something else, but could arch be getting confused with the other terabyte disk?

slide_rule

Member

From: loglogdecalog

Registered: 2007-09-16

Posts: 33

Re: kernel panic with two sata hard disks connected

It looks like you may have set up your fstab wrong, "/dev/root" is very suspicious.  Check and see if anything in fstab has /dev/root in the device field.  Failing that, put the 2nd drive in and boot from the Arch CD and compare its setup to yours.

[edit]  You could also boot your system (arch root=/path/to/your/root/device) and run mkinitcpio -p kernel26, which should rebuild your kernel with a working config [/edit]

Last edited by slide_rule (2008-06-10 23:37:49)

rumil

Member

From: Krakow, Poland

Registered: 2007-11-16

Posts: 39

Re: kernel panic with two sata hard disks connected

If you use /dev/sd?? entries in /etc/fstab and as root= boot parameter it's possible that connecting server disk changed the drive letter of your "root" disk (ie. sda3 became sdb3). Try to use  persistent block device naming.

jacko

Member

Registered: 2007-11-23

Posts: 840

Re: kernel panic with two sata hard disks connected

If you use /dev/sd?? entries in /etc/fstab and as root= boot parameter it's possible that connecting server disk changed the drive letter of your "root" disk (ie. sda3 became sdb3). Try to use  persistent block device naming.

this is exactly the fix, just stopped in to mention this unless someone else already did. Which I see they did... so I will say two thumbs up for this fix.