"Gave up waiting for root device"

[TheAdmiralty]

UPDATE 2:

I just reformatted the drive and installed Zorin OS 6 in place of Kubuntu 12.10, and it has the exact same problem. Installed fine, made it to splash screen, drops to BusyBox. Reboot, and it "Gave up waiting for root device."

UPDATE 3:

Zorin now boots to nothing but a black screen with the flashing white cursor. No clue what's going on, but I'm going to reinstall everything another time and see what I get.

[matt_symes]

Hi

I wonder if your initramfs is missing some scsi driver that is on the LiveCD/USB but not in your initramfs ?

EDIT:

Boot into a liveCD/USB.

mount the scsi drive and check you can write to it and type

lsmod | sort

Post the results back here.

EDIT2:

BTW: That photo looked peachy. Noothing wrong that i could see in the text displayed. Looks like the drives are fine.

I couold not make head nor tail of the video though.

Kind regards

[Bashing-om]

If I might make an interjection.
As the drives were previously used in a server, recon they were in a raid array and there exist meta data on those hard drives ?
I do not recall what the effect would seem when trying to install on top of that "meta data", but is this worth a thought ?

think'n to excess ??

[TheAdmiralty]

Alright, I'm posting this from Zorin, which I finally got to boot; PenDriveLinux was giving me constant bad disks, so I redid the LiveOS with LiLi.
I'm assuming the basic subsystems are close enough between it and Ubuntu to still be useful, but if not, I can do a Live boot of Kubuntu 12.10 now that I have a working boot disk creator.
lsmod | sort outputs the following:

ac97_bus               12642  1 snd_ac97_codec
binfmt_misc            17292  1 
bluetooth             158479  10 rfcomm,bnep
bnep                   17830  2 
btrfs                 638248  0 
cfi_probe              12582  0 
cfi_util               17434  1 cfi_probe
chipreg                13117  2 cfi_probe,scb2_flash
dm_log                 18193  3 dm_raid45,dm_mirror,dm_region_hash
dm_mirror              21822  0 
dm_multipath           22747  0 
dm_raid45              76451  0 
dm_region_hash         16100  1 dm_mirror
drm                   197641  2 r128
fat                    55605  1 vfat
floppy                 60184  0 
gameport               15060  1 snd_ens1371
gen_probe              12624  1 cfi_probe
hid                    77428  1 usbhid
i2c_piix4              13093  0 
libcrc32c              12543  1 btrfs
lp                     17455  0 
mac_hid                13077  0 
map_funcs              12630  1 scb2_flash
Module                  Size  Used by
mptbase                96852  2 mptspi,mptscsih
mptscsih               39530  1 mptspi
mptspi                 22474  18 
mtd                    35584  1 scb2_flash
nls_cp437              12751  1 
nls_iso8859_1          12617  1 
overlayfs              27550  1 
parport                40930  3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp
parport_pc             32114  1 
pata_serverworks       13189  1 
ppdev                  12849  0 
psmouse                86520  0 
r128                   40572  1 
rfcomm                 38139  0 
scb2_flash             12710  0 
serio_raw              13027  0 
snd                    62218  11 snd_ens1371,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device
snd_ac97_codec        110213  1 snd_ens1371
snd_ens1371            24819  2 
snd_page_alloc         14108  1 snd_pcm
snd_pcm                80916  2 snd_ens1371,snd_ac97_codec
snd_rawmidi            25424  2 snd_ens1371,snd_seq_midi
snd_seq                51592  2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_seq_device         14172  3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq
snd_seq_midi           13132  0 
snd_seq_midi_event     14475  1 snd_seq_midi
snd_timer              28931  2 snd_pcm,snd_seq
soundcore              14635  1 snd
squashfs               36095  1 
sworks_agp             13286  0 
tg3                   141369  0 
usbhid                 41937  0 
vfat                   17308  1 
xor                    25987  1 dm_raid45
zlib_deflate           26622  1 btrfs

Still won't boot off of the SCSI drive, doing the exact same thing as described before. I'm putting up a new picture of the dmesg output on first boot; it's a little different on Zorin than what Kubuntu was giving me.
http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/s...psd3610d4d.jpg

[matt_symes]

Hi

If I might make an interjection.
As the drives were previously used in a server, recon they were in a raid array and there exist meta data on those hard drives ?
I do not recall what the effect would seem when trying to install on top of that "meta data", but is this worth a thought ?

think'n to excess ??

dm_log                 
18193  3 dm_raid45,dm_mirror,dm_region_hash dm_mirror              
21822  0  dm_multipath           
22747  0  dm_raid45              
76451  0  dm_region_hash         
16100  1 dm_mirror

Bashing_om. That is worth checking.

These are raid drivers. They are loaded amongst other drivers.

Were the drives part of a raid array ? Do you have then set up as a raid array ?

Kind regards

[TheAdmiralty]

They were, but all three drives have been set as independent under the LSI configuration. The configuration looks like this:

FUJITSU 15K                      Independant                        Disk 0                    Root Drive
SEAGATE CHEETAH 1                Ind. (Ex-RAID1)                    Disk 1
SEAGATE CHEETAH 2                Ind. (Ex-RAID1) (Unpowered)        Disk 2

The Fujutsi drive was never in any RAID array; I got it shortly after the server itself. Both Seagate Cheetahs came with the server in RAID-1 with each other, but the array was split. The operating system is being installed to the Fujitsu drive. The last Cheetah drive isn't connected, due to the fact that I only have three Molex connectors at the moment; two are used for internal drives, and the last one for the HDD I'm using as a LiveOS drive.

[schragge]

It may sound silly, but have you tried to explicitly specify root= and rootdelay= as kernel boot options? I mean, while at Grub menu, edit the kernel line as described at community/Grub2/Troubleshooting, and change the root=UUID=long_string_of_hexadecimals part to something like

root=/dev/sda1 rootdelay=120

where sda1 is your root partition.

[matt_symes]

Hi

Which disk did you install Ubuntu on ?

Here's another kernel boot parameter you can try.

scsi_mod.scan=sync

Kind regards

[schragge]

For the record: how to enable verbose SCSI logging.

BTW, there's pata_serverworks for Broadcom ServerWorks IDE controller, but I didn't noticed any SCSI driver in the lsmod output: mptscsih, mptbase, mptspi, but no scsi_mod

$ modinfo mptbase | grep debug
parm:           mpt_debug_level: debug level - refer to mptdebug.h - (default=0)
parm:           mpt_fwfault_debug:Enable detection of Firmware fault and halt Firmware on fault - (default=0) (int)

I've also found this: LSI Fusion MPT. And this: Instructions to enable SATA-IDE mode for HT1000. Also have a look at mpt-status and megaraid.txt (ChangeLog.megaraid, ChangeLog.megaraid_sas). lsiutil can be downloaded from here (somehow, I can find only an older version on LSI website).

Now, I'd like to see the output of

lspci -vmmnn | egrep -A6 '^Class:[[:blank:]](IDE|SCSI)'

[matt_symes]

Hi

That would make sense scragge.

I am still wonder if his initramfs is missing the scsi drivers for the LSI card.

Kind regards