Arch Linux

mos98

Member

Registered: 2010-02-07

Posts: 24

Root device mounted successfully, but /sbin/init does not exists.

I posted my problem in the newbie board
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=94208

but since the issue turns out to be pretty hard to solve I'm x-posting this here too.

Short summary:

+ Partitioned a new hard drive same as my old one
+ used cp -a to copy from drive /dev/sda to /dev/sdb
+ installed grub on the new drive / reconfigured grub/menu.lst
+ detached the old IDE drive and made the new drive the MASTER IDE drive
+ reboot => select the 1st kernel option  in the boot menu
+ boot prematurely terminates with error =>  screen reads:
Root device mounted successfully, but /sbin/init does not exists.
Bailing out, you are on your own. Good luck

/bin/sh: can't access  tty; job control turned off
[ramfs /]#

No logs are written whatsoever, so you're left alone for real.

Things I've done so far to try to fix the problem but with no avail

+ reinstall the current kernel via arch live cd  
+ reinstall sysvinit in chroot environment vie live cd
+ using clonezilla to make a exact clone of my old drive. Though I could boot afterwards into Windows7 hassle free clonezilla didn't
   do nothing to fix the problem with archlinux

what works is doing a full install of the base packages (using the same partitions as before). But this is not what I want, so as soon as I copy the content of my original ROOT partition (i.e. /) from my old drive back to the new one I'm again where I started.

Something doesn't go very well along with my old ROOT partition on the new drive I guess.

Could it be a bug in archlinux ?

Last edited by mos98 (2010-04-01 17:28:37)