Boot Problem after Crash

[Tony Abou-Assaleh]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> 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?

--
major	minor	#blocks	name
8	0	xxx	sda
8	1	xxx	sda1
8	2	xxx	sda2
9	0	xxx	md0
--

I omitted the block counts. sda1 is the boot partition, and sda2 is the 
raid container. When I run the same command from the recovery shell, I 
get 2 additional entries:

--
253	0	xxx	dm-0
253	1	xxx	dm-1
--

Where dm-0 is the swap partition and dm-1 is the root partition.

> How about /proc/mdstat?

--
Personalities : [raid1]
md0 : active raid1 sda2[0]
	xxx blocks [2/1] [U_]

unused devices: <none>
--

> 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.

I changed it to use root=UUID=xxx in the grub menu.lst, same thing.

> 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?

I can boot fine from a live CD, so the machine is linux compatible. I 
was able to connect to the Internet, start apache and sshd manually, and 
connect to them from another machine.

Also I ran update-initramfs on the new machine, so again that's not 
likely to be the problem.

It looks like the raid volume is recognized during the boot sequence, 
but the partitions within it are not. Any ideas?

Cheers,

TAA

-- 
Tony Abou-Assaleh
Email:    taa-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org
Web site: http://tony.abou-assaleh.net
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists