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Ok so heres the situation, i have a notebook with a failing CD-drive that wont boot, nor does usb-boot work on this old thing.
I have an external enclosure and was able to install to the drive this way from my main PC. but of course when i plug this back in device uuids change so I had to modify the fstab and menu.lst
Problem is, the device is not being created during boot so i have no /dev/sda2 to reference in menu.lst.
When i boot I am just told that the root device is non-existant and dumped to a ramdisk shell
Does anyone know how I can get /dev/sda2 to be created during boot? or somehow else install on this, preferably without using network boot?
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It might be because the hardrive driver is not included in the initramfs. Try to play with /etc/mkinitcpio.conf's MODULE and HOOKS.
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its a standard ata-6 connected disk, what would I need to "play" with?
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I don't really know...
You probably have "autodetect" in HOOKS, it will automatically put what is used by the _actual_ machine, which might be different from your laptop...
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You could have a bootable live Arch distro with session saving. You will be stuck with a "session" saving live distro, which has one disadvantage (session saving is kind of awkward at shutdown), but many more advantages, especially for your "ailing" laptop.
The general process:
Get Chakra-Live
http://chakra-project.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?id=544
and use the USB image
http://chakra-project.org/download-iso.html
And put it on the drive... but it will wipe out anything on the drive.
Alternatively, if you liked what was on your drive and did not want to wipe it clean, and one partition is not NTFS (grub does not read this), you could download the CD iso, copy the contents to the non NTFS drive, and install grub and make a grub entry in your grub menu. If you do this method, you'll need some help most likely to get grub to look in the proper place for things, and you would have add an entry by hand to the grub menu. This is all fairly simple to do with guidance, so if you do go this route, post back and I will be more detailed on what you need to do.
I know if you install Ubuntu to a device using one computer, and put it into another, it will boot all the way up to the desktop most of the time. It somehow maintains some "detection" conveniences when it hard installs. Last I checked and I tried this once, Arch as a regular install could not seem to pull this off. I tried this 6 months ago so I could be incorrect at this point in time.
Last edited by bwh1969 (2009-03-18 12:52:16)
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is your cd drive really broken or does grub break on it? if so, our isolinux cd's should work.
the usb method not working is also weird.. did you enable boot from usb in the bios? (or maybe your bios doesn't support it yet)
there are also the options like noacpi etc that you can try playing with it.
Other then that, what you want to do should be quite easy to do. did you use the 2009.02 cd?
< Daenyth> and he works prolifically
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I have done this kind of manipulation without problem. I assume you have installed grub correctly on the new disk (otherwise you wont even boot in the initrd). You have corrected /boot/grub/menu.lst and fstab to refer to the actual root? Try to mount your root by hand from the initramfs to see what happens. I would guess that you miss the right module to access your root. Try to boot with the kernel26-fallback.img initrd or rebuild an initrd without the autodetect hook (see /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and man mkinitcpio). If you succeed to boot in this way you can rebuild a normal initrd from your new system (with the autodetect hook, it will then correctly autodect things for your new computer).
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for usb boot, you should have usb in MODULES in mkinitcpio.conf
You should also implement rootdelay at grub.
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I assure you that the drive is really dead, and usb booting is not supported in the bios so yeah, no option of that. I did use 2009.02 and did use the automatic install of grub to the usb disk.
I have tried the options noacpi and legacy ide neither did work.
Olive, i cannot mount root as the device does not even exist in the ramdisk output of cd /dev/ and echo * leaves only a lot of ttys, but not actual devices
I will try messing around with mkinitcpio tonight
Archlinuxsagi, rootdelay wont work because the device is never created at all, its not just delayed
I believe it is the autodetect and i will have to mess around with the mkinitcpio or do pxe, just was hoping not to have to do that as i have zero experience with that.
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