Boot Problem after Crash

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Mar 07, 2008 at 01:39:18PM -0400, Tony Abou-Assaleh wrote:
> Hi tlugers,
> 
> My PSU was toasted. I took the HDD out and installed it on another PC. 
> The file system had problems but after e2fsck it appears stable. No data 
> was lost as far as I can tell, but I couldn't boot into by Ubuntu 7.10 
> (xubunutu) Linux.
> 
> I booted using a live CD and went to rescue mode. I updated/upgraded 
> packages using apt-get, executed update-initramfs, and all seemed well. 
> I can even start apache and sshd from this rescue shell.
> 
> When I try to boot from the HDD I consistently get the same thing: I get 
> the BusyBox initramfs shell and I don't know how to go past that. 
> Nothing is mounted.
> 
> I have the boot partition on /dev/sda1 and the root partition on raid1 
> volume. I am using only a single drive from the raid array.
> 
> Any ideas why I'm getting the initramfs prompt on boot and how to get 
> past that?

Perhaps the new machine enumerates the disks differently so it doesn't
know where to look for the root.

What do you get from 'cat /proc/partitions' in the initramfs shell?

How about /proc/mdstat?

Perhaps you can find out what root is called and change the boot loader
to use root= whatever that is.

I do everything in the boot loader and fstab by UUID these days just to
avoid this kind of hassle.

The other option is that your initramfs only loaded the driver modules
needed by the old machine and not the ones for the new one, although
most I have seen recently (in debian at least) try to load pretty much
everything.  Is the new machine perhaps too new or simply not supported
by your linux version?

--
Len Sorensen
--
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