On 2009/12/09 02:04 (GMT-0500) Bob S composed:
On Tuesday 08 December 2009 01:04:45 Felix Miata wrote:
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.
Thanks for replying. Seems you always come to my rescue. The boot partition is indelibly pasted in my mind. (sdc8) Not sure what you mean about the "root=position". You mean as an option on the grub menu? You mean /dev/sdc8 ? or (hd2,7) ?
FYI every partition on every disk is mounted no matter what OS is mounted and run. I can see everything and access everything. I can look at the 11.2 /boot/grub/menu.lst or the fstab or whatever. I have made sure that every menu.lst is exactly the same for every OS.
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.
OK, I have noticed that the new boot sequence is different from what I am used to seeing. Lots of USB stuff which is kind of confusing to me. So, can I build a new initrd for 11.2 ? You spoke of rescue boot for grub. Is that part of the grub command? Guess I will have to review my grub options.
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.
The old motherboard was an MSI K8T with a 939 pin AMD processor, about 4 years old. Can't believe that the 939 is "passe" Was definitely caps. The new board is also MSI "V" series with a dual core AMD processor.
Any further instruction/guidance is certainly appreciated.
For those who were following this thread and/or trying to help, everybody seems to have been lead astray, by the fact that 11.0 would still boot, from asking a critical question: Do the chipsets in both the old and new motherboards require the same storage drivers? The answer turned out to be no. The reason 11.0 would boot while 10.2 and 11.2 would not is (AFAICT) that its /etc/sysconfig/kernel's INITRD_MODULES line specified both VIA (old chipset) and AMD (new chipset) storage drivers, while for 10.2 & 11.2 only those for VIA were specified, which meant that the existing initrds built for 10.2 and 11.2 were missing the drivers required to find any disks at all after the motherboard replacement. Bob brought his puter here to visit me about 11 hours ago, which is how we got this figured out. We stumbled around quite a while with Knoppix, 11.0 and DFSee boots thinking some kind of Grub and/or BIOS drive order trouble until eventually I realized looking at a Grub prompt's 'find /boot/grub/stage1' output that 11.2's root partition didn't seem to exist, which is when the light bulb clicked on. We built a new initrd for 11.2 by booting installed system from the 11.2 DVD's rescue menu. Then we built one for 10.2 via chroot from an 11.0 boot. When he left, the machine was able to boot 10.2, 11.0 & 11.2, all from using 11.0's Grub menu without any chainloading. The question remains why only 11.0 would have specified inclusion of drivers for one chipset that was not on the old motherboard (i.e. AMD), but not others (e.g. Intel). -- " 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/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org