F9alpha AMD-64 HP DC7700 SFF switch_root: no filesystems

John Summerfield debian at herakles.homelinux.org
Sun Feb 24 08:12:12 UTC 2008


The box in question doesn't boot Linux atm, so getting info is 
difficult, so I'll try the easy option first. If needs, I can connect a 
serial cable and something else. For them moment I will describe 
messages rather than quote them

It was running F8 quite well, and then I enabled development and ran 
"yum upgrade"

More precisely,
echo yum -y upgrade | at midnight

When that had finished, seamonkey crashed and I decided on the balance 
of things, a reboot was in order.

As supplied, it had 80 Gbytes disk and no DVD; I've added a DVD burner 
and replaced the original drive with 320 Gbytes and added 512 Gbytes.

It displays the usual boot messages and finishes with something like 
"the boot has failed" pretty much straight after "switch_root: no such file"

The other messages on-screen don't suggest to me that it's found either 
the 320 Gbyte drive (where Fedora lives) or the 500 Gbyte drive, 
although the DVD burner is clearly in evidence. It certainly complains 
about its inability to find the volume group.

To make things very much worse, yum has misplaced my previous working 
kernel. I expect that if I could boot that, all would be moderately well.

I do have a xen configuration (that was the whole point of the box and 
of F8), but that fails even more quickly.

Things I have tried:
1. Google. Google has heard of some of the symptoms wrt other releases 
and distros. It was those hits that made me look to see what the kernel 
said about my disks, I wondered whether it had reordered them.

2. The incoming email from this list, which I'd not read recently. 
Nothing seems pertinent.

3. Every kernel in my grub list. However, no useful overrides come to 
mind. "init=/bin/bash" doesn't help.

4. Finding a rawhide rescue CD. I don't think it would work, but it 
might be useful to know.

5. Booting an F8 rescue CD. I forgot the pci=nomsi,nommconf trick (which 
also works for Knoppix 5.1 on the same hardware), but it didn't stop 
there, when last I looked it was taking ages running /sbin/loader.


Does anyone recognise the problem, and importantly, does anyone have a 
quick fix?


-- 

Cheers
John

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