Upgrade to Feisty Fawn...and ubuntu doesnt boot

[Ram Ravichandran]

Hi,
I decided to upgrade my ubuntu from edgy to feisty since the software manager was nice enough to let me know that a new distribution was available! The upgrade process went smoothly allnight long. I have a dual boot, switched to windows and then tried to boot into ubuntu this morning, but the bar on splash screen moves a little bit and then stops. I booted into command line and saw the following:

Loading Ubuntu, please wait...

check root = bootarg cat /proc/cmdline
or missing modules, devices: cat/proc/modules ls /dev
ALERT! /dev/hda3 does not exist Dropping to shell!

BusyBox v1.1.3 Built-in shell (ash)

/bin/sh can't access tty; job control mode off.

and then puts me into an intiramfs prompt.

I guess that in the upgrade process, the device map pointing to the right boot partition (/dev/hda2) and the home partition (/dev/hda3) got mixed up.

Any ideas on how I can go about fixing this? Is downgrading back to edgy possible? I'd really like to get back to my ubuntu environment rather than windows.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Thanks,
Ram

[autocrosser]

The kernel that Feisty uses now polls for SATA instead of IDE/ATA. Boot off of a live CD & modify your /etc/fstab to reflect sda instead of hda (also check your /boot/grub/menu.list)--I would guess that there are several threads like this....Look for UUID to setup your system the new way.

[forlaf]

Good luck, Ram. I had the same thing happen, and I gather it's been happening to allot of people with two hard drives. I was able to boot the kernel 2.6.17-10 version by putting it as the first entry in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. I was then able to upgrade to Feisty with that kernal. It works, but I haven't been able yet to upgrade the kernal to 2.6.20-15.
David.

[Ram Ravichandran]

Something interesting...
i mounted my harddrive(hda3) using a live cd, and the /boot folder was empty!
i mounted the boot partition (hda1) and it contained all my boot files!!

Any ideas why or how to proceed from here?

[forlaf]

I'm not certain about the where your boot files are, but I wanted to say that I followed Autocrosser's reference to sda as opposed to hda. I found the last entry on this thread particularly useful. I believe I now have a fully functioning installation of Feisty.
David.

[ecionci]

check out my post above "reboot interrupted with this" I explain how I fixed this (with a little help
from my friends).

[Ram Ravichandran]

Thanks all for your replies...I've gone ahead and changed my fstab to
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda3 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/sda2 /boot ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/sda1 /media/hda1 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
/dev/sda4 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

and also changed grub's menu.lst
## ## End Default Options ##

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-11-generic
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.17-11-generic root=/dev/sda3 ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.17-11-generic
quiet
savedefault
boot

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-11-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.17-11-generic root=/dev/sda3 ro single
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.17-11-generic
boot

title Ubuntu, memtest86+
root (hd0,1)
kernel /memtest86+.bin
quiet
boot

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian
# ones.
title Other operating systems:
root


# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/hda1
title Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

I still get the same message when I boot into ubuntu. should i change root to an 'sdx' form?

[autocrosser]

I'm running two drives & my /boot/grub/menu.lst looks like:

## ## End Default Options ##

splashimage=(hd1,0)/boot/grub/splashimages/soft-tux.xpm.gz

title Feisty, kernel 2.6.20-15-generic
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-15-generic root=UUID=d4c465e8-62a9-47cd-89fc-11035d656290 ro ht=on splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-15-generic
quiet
savedefault

title Feisty, kernel 2.6.20-15-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-15-generic root=UUID=d4c465e8-62a9-47cd-89fc-11035d656290 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-15-generic

title Feisty, kernel 2.6.20-14-generic
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-14-generic root=UUID=d4c465e8-62a9-47cd-89fc-11035d656290 ro ht=on splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-14-generic
quiet
savedefault

title Feisty, kernel 2.6.20-14-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-14-generic root=UUID=d4c465e8-62a9-47cd-89fc-11035d656290 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-14-generic

title Feisty, memtest86+
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin
quiet

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian
# ones.
title Other operating systems:
root

title Edgy, kernel 2.6.17-11-generic
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-11-generic root=UUID=1b31b23b-4db9-42c1-84a8-fd1f21992500 ht=on ro splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-11-generic
savedefault
boot


# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/hda2.
title Edgy, kernel 2.6.17-11-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-11-generic root=UUID=1b31b23b-4db9-42c1-84a8-fd1f21992500 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-11-generic
savedefault
boot


# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/hda2.
title Edgy, kernel 2.6.17-10-generic
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-generic root=UUID=1b31b23b-4db9-42c1-84a8-fd1f21992500 ht=on ro splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-10-generic
savedefault
boot


# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/hda2.
title Edgy, kernel 2.6.17-10-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-generic root=UUID=1b31b23b-4db9-42c1-84a8-fd1f21992500 ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-10-generic
savedefault
boot


# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/hda2.
title Edgy, memtest86+
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin
savedefault
boot

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/hda1
title Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

You can see that Edgy & WinXP are on hd0,0 & hd0,1, while Feisty is on hd0,1. Everything is refered to by UUID.

[mikexgough]

just having a look here, I have 2 machines and went for the upgrade option through the update manager, one went through no probs (this has 2 hard drives - one for data onlt the other for Ubuntu only) the other machine dual boots M$ windozw 2k & ubuntu and has 1 hard drive - this is the one that now wont boot and was running edgy fine on 2.17 kernel, I have tried to boot the 2.17 and thats no go either..........so this is not isolated to dual Hard drive pc's
I will try some of the suggestions on here and if sucessfull repost my findings

[theseeker213]

The Feisty Fawn upgrade also completely killed my machine. It had an error while updating samba (almost halfway through), now it does not boot up and I get

1) Errors from init about /etc/event.d/tty1 through tty5, control-alt-delete,logd,sulogin about "Unknown stanza"
2) udevd complaining that PHYSDEV* rules are deprecated
3) udevd error "specified group 'nvram' unknown'
4) udevd could not find "60-libpisock.rules"
5) udevd deprecated a direct reference to sysfs directories in 65-persistent-storage.rules

I am contemplating wiping it and doing a reinstall. This is very frustrating! I wish it could back out of an install once it finds an error, perhaps something similar to Gentoo's sandbox model.