Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1660 mails)

[Felix Miata <mrmazda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2009/12/07 23:45 (GMT-0500) Bob S composed:

> I installed 11.2  a couple of weeks ago and have been playing with it on and 
> off. Booted and ran just fine.  At the present I have 3 other OS's installed. 
> (10.2, 11.0, and winders) (11.0 is my everyday user system)

> Last thursday I had a catastrophic failure of my MB. I replaced the MB and 
> processor and got up running again. Except that 11.2 won't boot now. It 
> starts with grub and gets about half way through the boot process and fails 
> with the message "Cannot locate /dev/disk/by-label/11.2". Then it offers to 
> look for the /dev/disk/by-id (which it identifies correctly) and I answer 
> yes. Then it grinds away for awhile generating several lines of dots, and 
> then tries to dump me into a shell and also fails with a kernel panic.

Boot 11.0 and find out the name of the partition on which 11.2 is installed,
e.g. /dev/sda6. Then boot to the 11.2 Grub menu, and substitute that at the
root= position. Once you have 11.2 booted you can repair the Grub menu and
fstab if necessary.

> That is the very disk it is actually booting from????   and it can't find 
> it?? 
> To be fair, the grub that it is using is on 11.0 There are no logs generated.
> And maybe I don't understand the boot process well enought. Does the process 
> run for a long time before it gets around to loading the software?

You're hitting fallout from widespread changes made to support booting from
USB and other media that may or may not be present on any given boot.
Apparently part of the disk label for that partition in /dev is tied to the
controller on the dead motherboard, but its the label hiding in the initrd,
not the applicable one, if I'm right about what's going on. It may mean you
won't be able to boot using the old initrd and will have to rescue boot to
build a new one, depending on whether the initrd supports the necessary
device name.

> When the failure occurred it was at turning the machine on.
> What could have happened to cause this and how do I fix it? Some clues, ideas 
> please?

Exactly when was the old motherboard made? Make? Model? If it's several years
old it could be victim of premature cap failure, nothing to do with actually
using or misusing it.
-- 
"   We have no government armed with power capable of
contending with human passions unbridled by morality and
religion."                  John Adams, 2nd US President

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/
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