F9alpha AMD-64 HP DC7700 SFF switch_root: no filesystems

[Michal Jaegermann]

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
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.

   Michal