[GTALUG] Boot problem

[Michael Galea]

On 01/21/17 12:58, Anthony de Boer wrote:
> Michael Galea via talk wrote:
>> I am seeing a problem at boot time that has appeared in kernels after
>> 4.3.0-1-amd64.
>>
>> My system will boot, show the available debian kernels, select the
>> latest and then jump into initramrs.  It claims it can not mount dev and
>> other partitions and, indeed, an ls on the mounted /dev/sda1 shows that
>> my esata drive has been mounted as root!
>
> Debian generates an initramfs at kernel-install time; is it possible
> that the esata was mounted when you installed that kernel?  Maybe run
> update-initramfs again after booting without the esata connected.
>
Sure, almost certainly..

> Linux can get its own weird ideas about enumeration order of disks,
> network cards, PCI slots, etc, and that's why we have UUIDs and I
> thought the Debian initramfs ought to remember the specific UUID of the
> root device it was generated to use.  However, I don't have any
> Debian-amd64 hardware to check at home here.
>
Thanks Anthony,
I tried unmount+poweroff esata and "update-initramfs -u" and reboot but 
no success.

It still boots from the hard disk but attempts to mount the OS from 
esata. The only difference is that the timing of when I have to switch 
on the esata is now "very tight" at less than a few seconds after I get 
the clean message from fsck, or boot fails (missing mount in fstab).

-- 
Michael Galea