Arch Linux

jazznaz

Member

Registered: 2011-05-11

Posts: 10

"Unable to determine major/minor of root device" when using two HDDs

I'm getting an intermittent error stating "Unable to determine major/minor of root device /dev/sda3" when booting my Arch linux install. Let me outline how my system is set up:

1 TB SATA HDD (/dev/sda)

/boot = sda2
/root = sda3
/home = sda4

Windows 7 install on sda1

I then have a 2 TB HDD formatted in NTFS that I use to share data (music, movies etc) between Linux and Windows. This entire drive is just one partition (/dev/sdb1)

As far as I can tell, occasionally when I boot up my computer, it incorrectly assigns device names to my HDDs, bringing up a disk message stating that it has found the two disks:

sdb = sdb1 sdb2 sdb3 sdb4
sda = sda1

I then get the error that it cannot find the root device /dev/sda3 and I'm dropped to a recovery shell where my keyboard doesn't work and I have to reboot and try again. Eventually I'll get lucky and it will assign all the labels correctly and I can get to my desktop.

Does anyone know if this is a problem with udev or possibly my configuration? I've tried editing my fstab and tried a stable lts kernel (as I saw advised in other threads) by it hasn't solved my issue.

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: "Unable to determine major/minor of root device" when using two HDDs

Try https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pe … ice_naming

weltio

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2009-04-05

Posts: 87

Re: "Unable to determine major/minor of root device" when using two HDDs

damn it- wrong topic -.-

Last edited by weltio (2011-06-22 14:46:56)

jazznaz

Member

Registered: 2011-05-11

Posts: 10

Re: "Unable to determine major/minor of root device" when using two HDDs

Renaming devices by label and updating /etc/fstab and menu.lst seems to have done the trick. Thanks very much!