F9alpha AMD-64 HP DC7700 SFF switch_root: no filesystems

[John Summerfield]

Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 06:49:09PM +0900, John Summerfield wrote:
>> The first problem is the kernel doesn't find the disks. At all.
> 
> You are obviously correct.  OTOH from your description you already
> booted, in some sense, and now you a failing to find file systems
> with predictable results.
> 
> The most popular reason from what you are seeing is that initrd you
> are trying to use is shot and does not have required drivers to
> access disks or it is not loading those correctly.  Chances are that
> there is nothing wrong with your kernel but a user-space utility
> 'mkinitrd' screwed up.  Another, in practice more remote,
> possibility is that this is really a drivers, hence a kernel, fault.
> 
> A way to recover from that predicament is to boot a machine "rescue"
> from an installation media (CD, DVD, network, USB drive, whatever
> works).  You say that F8 worked on your machine so this should be
> ok.  Once you can access your disks is some way then you are already
> most of the way there.  On a rescue image you have ssh, can get
> network connections,  you may mount removables, etc., so you have
> means to grab another version of mkinitrd and/or kernel packages and
> whatever else you need.  Once you have everything needed usually the
> simplest way is to 'chroot /mnt/sysimage' and do required work from
> there.
> 
> Pay attention what ended up on initrd you produced.  If you have any

Michael
Thanks for your offering. One small flaw, whilst the f8 rescue CD boots 
(very slowly, a test takes around half an hour to boot), as I already 
said, I can't run programs from the f8alpha filesystem with it.

That really has me flummoxed, I was running with an f8 kernel 
immediately prior to rebooting.


> doubts what is really there then a quick way to examine results
> would be:
> mkdir -p /var/tmp/ir; cd /var/tmp/ir 
> zcat <initrd_image_in_question> | cpio -imd
> and look at results.  In particular 'init' is a simple shell script.

I have done that by copying to another system (using the rescue system) 
and it looks fine to me. In particular, it contain ata_piix which is, I 
think, the relevant driver.

I also have the kernel Andrew thinks will fix this, but I've not yet 
managed to construct an initrd for it. I can't chroot into the installed 
image, and mkinitrd doesn't run without being chrooted.

I've tried unpacking the kernel Andrew suggested and untarred it into 
place, but thus far my efforts to manipulate the .64 initrd into .65 
have been too ham-fisted.

A question that comes to mind is, "How do people ordinarily _install_ 
Rawhide?" I can't find a boot image of any kind.

The nearest I can see is the f9alpha install DVD. The install trees I've 
found don't have a boot.iso.

> 
>    Michal
> 


-- 

Cheers
John

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