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#1 2011-03-20 03:56:04

Caipré
Member
From: U.S.
Registered: 2009-07-29
Posts: 9

[Solved] After installation, /sbin/init does not exist

I recently tried installing Arch; the problems of that experience were discussed in this thread.

I now have Arch installed, but am still unable to boot into the OS. After the BIOS screen, the GRUB2 menu displays, and I select Arch. The boot process hangs with the error:

Waiting 10 seconds for device /dev/sda1 ...
EXT4-fs (sda1): mounted filesystem without journal. Opts: (null)
ERROR: Root device mounted successfully, but /sbin/init does not exist.
Bailing out, you are on your own. Good luck.

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

At this point, I'm the keyboard is unresponsive and my only option is to power down the machine and reboot.
I found this thread which discusses the same issue, but their solution was to use GRUB2, which I already am. The other fix is to "boot into the livecd and reinstall the sysvinit package." I've done something similar (see my other thread, linked above), but I'm unsure of how to install the package in this case -- I'm still not sure how to use the chroot command properly so that I'm installing packages to the harddisk rather than the live-usb.

  • How can I install the sysvinit package to the harddisk from a live-usb?

  • In general, how will updates affect me? Will I have to regularly fix these types of booting issues?

  • What causes this machine to be so difficult to install Linux on?

Last edited by Caipré (2011-03-21 04:49:28)

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#2 2011-03-21 04:48:07

Caipré
Member
From: U.S.
Registered: 2009-07-29
Posts: 9

Re: [Solved] After installation, /sbin/init does not exist

Managed to fix this on my own. The issue for me was simply that grub2 wasn't configured to use my partitioning scheme, because I had installed in manually (see previous thread).

From the live-usb:

mkdir /mnt/hdd
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/hdd
cd /mnt/hdd/grub
nano grub.cfg

Simply change the "root=/dev/sda#" to match the appropriate partition containing / . In my case, it was sda3:

# (0) Arch Linux
menuentry "Arch Linux" {
set root=(hd0,1)
linux /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sda3 ro
initrd /kernel26.img
}

Arch now boots fully!

Last edited by Caipré (2011-03-21 04:49:05)

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