F9alpha AMD-64 HP DC7700 SFF switch_root: no filesystems

[John Summerfield]

Andrew Farris wrote:
> John Summerfield wrote:
>>
>> 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"
>
> I suspect you've got the 54 or 64 kernel installed [1], both of which 
> fail for many people with the 'switch_root: no such file' error.  
> Backing it down to the 40 kernel may get you farther into the boot and 
> maybe show whether or not the volume group issue goes away or not.  To 
> get it backed down you'll need to download the kernel, boot into a 
> rescue mode, chroot, and install the older kernel.
>
> If this fails you might have to go farther back, getting a 2.6.24 
> kernel to install, then when booted to that you may be able to install 
> the 2.6.25 rc kernel (2.6.25 kernels had some issues with mkinitrd 
> when done on a 2.6.25 kernel, I'm not sure if that is resolved).
At present I have these kernels installed:
[summer at localhost ~]$ rpm -q kernel
kernel-2.6.25-0.69.rc3.git1.fc9.x86_64
kernel-2.6.23.1-31.fc8.x86_64
kernel-2.6.25-0.73.rc3.git1.fc9.x86_64
[summer at localhost ~]$

only kernel-2.6.23.1-31.fc8.x86_64 boots, all later ones including your 
65 fail in the same way.

This should identify the hardware without being too verbose:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 Memory Controller Hub 
(rev 02)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 
Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)
00:03.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 82Q963/Q965 HECI 
Controller (rev 02)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82566DM Gigabit Network 
Connection (rev 02)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI 
Contoller #4 (rev 02)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI 
Controller #5 (rev 02)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI 
Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio 
Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express 
Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI 
Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI 
Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI 
Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev f2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HO (ICH8DO) LPC Interface 
Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) 4 port 
SATA IDE Controller (rev 02)

>
> [1] http://koji.fedoraproject.org/packages/kernel/2.6.25/
>