Pxe boot install issues. "Check root=bootarg"

[Vesperatus]

Good afternoon,

I'm trying to take my first cup of ubuntu but for some reason, it's fighting with me. I made an overdose of mandriva and wanted to try ubuntu.

Since my laptop ( Toshiba Sattelite M40 ) cd-rom is busted and it wont boot from usb, i deceided to pxe boot it like I did to install mandriva-2008.

I downloaded this iso -> ubuntu-8.04.1-desktop-i386.iso, mounted it to my server hard-drive, configured tftpboot, dhcpd and received the pxe boot prompt and can select my boot option. Then, i can see the vmlinuz and initrd.gz loading and the boot process starts.

After a few seconds, it hangs for about 3 to 5 minutes and drops me to a shell with the following message :


Check root= bootarg cat /proc/cmdline
or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules ls /dev
ALERT! does not exists. Dropping to a shell.

My pxelinux.cfg/default is the following :


label 1
kernel pxeboot-ubuntu/vmlinuz
append initrd=pxeboot-ubuntu/initrd.gz noapic acpi=off


Now what ?! :(

Hope someone can help me ;)

[Vesperatus]

I kept looking for a solution regarding that issue and saw a few erros related with previous kernels. One thing that caught my eye is the line :


ALERT! does not exists. Dropping to a shell.

Usually, in the previous errors I saw on differents forums, there is supposed to be something between "ALERT!" and "does not exists".

Any suggestions on what I could do at the command line I receive right after to debug further ?

[Vesperatus]

Well, it's been a month now and I did not find anything on the internet.

If anyone has a least some pointers to start finding the issue here, I would be very happy.

[Randati]

I have same problem on my desktop.
I changed my kernel line in menu.lst to (now you don't have to wait couple of minutes):

kernel /casper/vmlinuz root=UUID=A6F5-D423
("ls /dev/disk/by-uuid/ -al" to get right uuid.)

Then I created /etc/fstab and wrote this:

/dev/sda2 / auto defaults 1 1
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

And now I get this:

Begin: Running /scripts/local-bottom ...
Done.
Done.
Begin: Running /scripts/init-bottom ...
mount: Mounting /root/dev on /dev/.static/dev failed: No such file or directory
Done.
mount: Mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: No such file or directory
mount: Mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: No such file or directory
Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init


So, what's going on?

[Randati]

Almost forgot. I finally solved how to install Ubuntu without CD, USB or something like that.

How to install Ubuntu from hard drive
1. Create small (1 GB) FAT32 partition.
2. Extract LiveCD there.
(3. Install GRUB if you haven't got it.)
4. Add something like this to menu.lst:

title Install Ubuntu

root (hd0,1)

kernel (hd0,1)/casper/vmlinuz file=(hd0,1)/preseed/ubuntu.seed root=(hd0,1) boot=casper initrd=/casper/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=130048 root=/dev/ram rw quiet splash --

initrd=/casper/initrd.gz
5. Reboot and you should have "LiveHDD"!

This didn't work on my C drive which is NTFS, but if you have FAT32, you should try it.