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zach_delta
June 25th, 2009, 01:07 PM
Over the last weekend I upgraded my ubunto system from Ubuntu 6 to Ubuntu 8. This included going from kernel kernel 2.6.15 to 2.6.24. After the upgrade had completed and when I attempted to reboot grub gave an error
“ALERT! /dev/hda1 does not exist. Dropping to shell”.
Fortunately I was to boot with the old kernel.

To cut 3 shorts days of investigation short I found:
After the upgrade IDE devices are now identified as SCSI devices also. IE /dev/hd?? no longer exist they are now all /dev/sd??

THIS HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH MY PROBLEM.
My problem was that after the upgrade I could no longer specify in menu.lst

“kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-24-386 root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet splash noapic”

I had to specify it as
"kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-24-386 root=UUID=<IUID Number> ro quiet splash noapic”

The weird thing was that the upgrade process had upgraded /etc/fstab so I was able to extract the UUID number from it.

Hopefully this may be of use to someone else.
Cheers zach

jimv
June 25th, 2009, 05:50 PM
To cut 3 shorts days of investigation short I found:
After the upgrade IDE devices are now identified as SCSI devices also. IE /dev/hd?? no longer exist they are now all /dev/sd??

THIS HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH MY PROBLEM.


Actually, that had everything to do with your problem. /dev/hda1 no longer existed (due to driver differences between 6 and 8 ). If you had replaced hda with sda in your menu.lst, you would have been fine too.

zach_delta
June 27th, 2009, 01:29 AM
Jimv,

I stand corrected. When I tried that it, by itself, it worked.

I know I had tried that earlier, but have a lesser understanding of GRUB than I do now, I had similtaneously updated the line "root (hd0,0)" to "root (sda,0)" or "root (sd0,0)".

I had presumed if one changed from HDxx to SDxx the other also changed to SDx.

I know, sigh, realise this is not the case.

Cheers Zach.
s

presence1960
June 27th, 2009, 02:37 AM
live and learn like the rest of us. it's all good!