FW: [SGVLUG] Fedora Core 8 GRUB boot settings

[Matthew Campbell]

G'devening all,

Here's the email I misposted before today's meeting, thanks everyone
who dropped by to help out.

Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Campbell
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 9:40 PM
To: SGVLUG Discussion List.
Subject: RE: [SGVLUG] Fedora Core 8 GRUB boot settings

Hi David,

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.  Here's where I am at:

>> It looks like the /boot partition was created properly,

>What /boot partition?  Do you mean a partition which contains the OS?
>There's no need for a separate boot partition except on PCs 12 years
>old or so that have bios that can't boot from high disk sectors.

You are correct.  The 'default' Fedora 8 installation still makes a
/boot partition as partition 0 on HD 0.  I left the default in my last
try to see if that was what was confusing GRUB.


>> but that
>> either GRUB or the kernel can not find the third partition on the
>> first disc where the root filesystem should live.  (The second
>> partition is a 5Gig swap area.)

>Isn't sda2 the 2nd partition?  Is it trying to mount the swap
>partition as root?  Do you have root=/dev/sda3 (per lilo, or the
>equivalent for grub) to tell the boot loader to use sda3 (the 3rd
>partition) as root?  Looks like sda2 may be the compiled-in default
>root.

Oops, my bad.  The current formatting is:
/dev/sda1 - /boot
/dev/sda2 - /
/dev/sda3 - swap
/dev/sda4 - Extended
/dev/sda5 - /server
Really sorry for the bad info above.  I have tried re-installing 7
times over the last week so I had a lot of options in my mind as I
wrote my plea for assistance.  I guess it helps if you get valid
data eh?

I have been able to boot the system off the CD drive, chroot to
/dev/sda2 and update the OS.  I have installed the services and
uploaded about 2.1T of data to the media server array.  It's running
now, but I have to start each service by hand each time I boot.
there has to be a simple solution doesn't there?

I'll be at the meeting tomorrow with the box as show and tell,
if anyone wants to take a look please feel free to say 'Hi!'.

(I can't remember when 4T of storage was patently not enough on
my home computer before, I'll be upgrading the RAID with another
1.5T once I get the boot problem licked.)

Looking forward to meeting everyone,

Matt

-- 
Matthew Campbell | Chief Technical Officer
Imagination Games
3330 Cahuenga Blvd. West #505
Los Angeles, CA  90068
323.850.9166 x225 (O)
323.850.9179 (F)
818.314.9897 (M)
matt.campbell at imaginationgames.com
www.imaginationgames.com


-----Original Message-----
From: sgvlug-bounces at sgvlug.net [mailto:sgvlug-bounces at sgvlug.net] On
Behalf Of David Lawyer
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 11:44 AM
To: SGVLUG Discussion List.
Subject: Re: [SGVLUG] Fedora Core 8 GRUB boot settings

On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 10:43:29PM -0800, Matthew Campbell wrote:
> Good evening,
>
> I have run across a simple problem that has had me stumped all day.
> Does anyone have a moment to help out?
>
> Default FC8 install creates a GRUB config file:
>   root (hd0,0)
>   kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.23.1-42.fc8 ro root=/dev/sda2 rhgb quiet
>
> When doing the vanilla installation and booting for the first time the
> kernel panics with:
> VFS: Cannot open root device "sda2" or unknown-block(0,0)
> Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:
> Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)
>
>
> I have spent hours sorting through many, many reports of this on
> Google.  It seems to span all makes of Linux and many kernel revs.  I
> tried all the 'this fixed it for me' suggestions to no avail.
>
> It looks like the /boot partition was created properly,

What /boot partition?  Do you mean a partition which contains the OS?
There's no need for a separate boot partition except on PCs 12 years
old or so that have bios that can't boot from high disk sectors.

> but that
> either GRUB or the kernel can not find the third partition on the
> first disc where the root filesystem should live.  (The second
> partition is a 5Gig swap area.)

Isn't sda2 the 2nd partition?  Is it trying to mount the swap
partition as root?  Do you have root=/dev/sda3 (per lilo, or the
equivalent for grub) to tell the boot loader to use sda3 (the 3rd
partition) as root?  Looks like sda2 may be the compiled-in default
root.

> I saw a mention that if the root file system is formatted ext3 that a
> plain kernel would not be able to boot as it doesn't have a chance to
> load the ext3 module.

I don't think you need any ext3 module to mount an ext3 file system.
Just mount it as ext2 and it should work, but you will not have any of
the ext3 recovery features.

> The post also noted that using a ram disk can get around this
> problem.  Unfortunately it does not appear that the default
> installation includes a ram disk image....
>
			David Lawyer


-- 
Matthew Campbell | Chief Technical Officer
Imagination Games
3330 Cahuenga Blvd. West #505
Los Angeles, CA  90068
323.850.9166 x225 (O)
323.850.9179 (F)
818.314.9897 (M)
matt.campbell at imaginationgames.com
www.imaginationgames.com