Troubleshooting or day to day fixings
Introduction
This post will be a container of issues I face daily and have to spend some time investigating and fixing so that you can save that time.
Contents
Issues and fixings
Debian "Waiting for root file system" message
Issue
when migrating from Debian Etch to Lenny somewhat (i guess not doing a proper upgrade) the system is not able to boot and displays "waiting for root file system" and then jumps to a busy-box shell. These advices didn't work for me:
specify labels in grub and fstab instead of device names (= /dev/hdaX ). you get the label by using e2label /dev/xxxx
specify UUID in grub and fstab. You can get the volume id by issuing the command vol_id
- issuing apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. Requires starting system from a live cd and chrooting to it (i used Debian 5 installation CD).
reconfiguring udev -> dpkg-reconfigure udev
removing and reinstalling udev -> apt-get remove udev; apt-get install udev
Solution
My problem was found when I noticed that my system was running a somewhat old kernel 2.6.18.xxx that didn't seem so suitable for Lenny version. Therefore by using a debian 5 installation CD and entering into rescue mode and starting a shell into my root partition I issued apt-get install linux-image and got prompted which linux-image from 2.6.26.xxx I wanted to install, I selected 2.6.26-2-686 and rebooted.
Everything worked okay again...so although I don't know exactly why apt-upgrade wasn't offering more recent kernels when my kernel was from a 2.6.18 branch when I installed a 2.6.26 kernel things got solved.
I think my system was in an inconsistent state by having everything updated to Lenny and the kernel still related to Etch.