Istvan Gabor composed on 2018-11-13 19:46 (UTC+0100):

I have the following problem in my openSUSE Leap 42.3 system.

I have an old IDE drive but I don't have IDE connector on my motherboard. I have inserted a PCI-IDE card into the motherboard. The card is recognized when I turn on the computer and the IDE drive attached to the card is also recognized.

When I encounter such an absence, I use a PATA to SATA converter if there is an available SATA port.

Grub is started correctly and it starts booting the OS. But soon booting stops with the following few lines at the end of message stream:

[OK] Reached target Remote File Systems (Pre). [OK] Reached target Remote File Systems. [OK] Reached target System Initialization. [OK] Reached target Basic System. [..] A start job is running for dev-sda9.device (...min ..s / no limit)

sda9 is the root partition of the OS and it seems the boot cannot find it and stops.

In my fstab sda9 is defined as:

UUID=97b17a79-12e8-4222-8702-972d121b9c9b / ext4 acl,user_xattr 1 1

Does that UUID match your kernel cmdline root=?

I suppose the culprit might be the initrd, maybe sda9 is hard coded into it, but I am not sure.

Initrd contains root's UUID, but it gets usurped by root= on cmdline when present.

Anyway, how could I trace what the problem is and fix it?

Depending on your root= on cmdline now, you might make sdb9 work. Normally it contains UUID, not device name. If cmdline actually contains /dev/sda9 now, that's the problem created by adding the PCI card.

If I remove the IDE hard drive attached to the PCI-IDE card, the system boots normal.

The PCI card is considered a SCSI device. It's being enumerated before the SATA ports, thus usurping sda from them. There may be a BIOS change you can make to cause the enumeration order to place the PCI card after the SATA ports. You might even be able to disable the PCI slot so that it isn't seen until after its driver loads. If its driver is different from that used by the SATA ports, you could explicitly exclude it from the initrd so that it loads after SATA enumeration has completed.

Some additional questions regarding the boot message stream:

How can I read the lines scrolled up, that is scrolling the screen?

You can try using journalctl -b -1 on the boot following removal of the PCI card.

Which is the point (what message) in the message stream where the booted OS takes the job from initrd?

Another queston regarding initrd/initramsfs:

How can I uncompress the initramfs to a temporary directory in Leap 42.3? None of the answers I found for linux general worked (gzip -dc, cpio -i).

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