On Sun, Dec 05, 2004, Jamie Wilkinson wrote: > These messages suggest that the initrd is borken, can you boot into > the old kernel, and remove the 2.6.9 kernel (purge it even) and > reinstall it? I've seen some recent kernel packages not upgrade > within the same kernel version properly.
I did that, and then seeing [1] (which doesn't seem to be a problem I have) I also did it with 2.6.8 instead a couple of times. No luck. > > Alternatively, mount the initrd image somewhere, and look to see if > it's got things that look right in it, like /dev entries and the > correct modules for your disks, and whatnot. If that's wrong then > usually the easiest method to fix the initrd is to reinstall the > kernel package and have it create the initrd from scratch based on the > currently running kernel. The initrd on a superficial check looked OK (ie, it's a mountable filesystem, it has /dev). I can't answer the question about whether it has the correct driver for my filesystem because Google and my offlist correspondent both indicate that the drivers for SATA controllers all changed names between 2.6.7 and 2.6.8 and hence I have very little idea of what the correct driver actually calls itself. (This is in addition to suddenly all becoming treated as SCSI devices.) If the install process really is building only current modules into the initrd, then that may explain the problem. If so though, I'm absolutely stuck for solving it, short of building an initrd by hand. At the moment I'm reasonably sure that it is *not* loading the correct driver, because the boot sequence goes: hdb: [Description of hdb -- it's a PATA CD-RW] Kernel panic rather than hdb: [Description of hdb] hde/sda/sde/something/anything: [Description of my SATA hard drive] Boot normally ie it doesn't notice that the SATA drive exists. I'd stick an Ubuntu Live CD in it to see if I can escape the whole problem, but unfortunately the Ubuntu and Ubuntu Live kernels are apparently sufficiently different that a system that works with the latter may not work with the former. -Mary [1] http://bugs.debian.org/283715 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
