initramfs + busybox trouble installing

[Matthew Good]

I've been having quite a problem with this installation. Tried to install Hardy Heron but I got busybox'd. Tried many of the solutions here but none worked. So, out of desperation, I popped in a Gutsy Gibbon disk. Lo and behold, it works. I then install Gutsy on my comp and upgrade to Hardy. I restart my computer and Busybox rears its ugly head. I need to get Hardy on this computer for school. Specs are below. I'm trying to install on the SATA HD.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+
Nvidia Geforce 8800GT
ASUS M2R32-MVP Mobo
one 320 Gb SATA HD
one 80 Gb IDE hd

Your setup is very similar to mine. To get hardy to install when your at the options menu press F6 and add pci=nomsi. That should get you thru or at least it did for me. To bad it doesn't work on the new Intrepid which I am still trying to figure out how to get that one installed.

[iamah]

will try the 8.10 or other distro someday, for now I'm using windows

[matis_keynell]

i had the same issue with wubi 8.04 & 8.10 live cd
'all_generic_ide irqpoll' fixed it the initramfs issue, but now installation stucks at
'usb hid core driver'
some mentioned adding a line: /sbin/udevsettle --timeout 10
to udev (in /scripts/init-premount) but i don't know how to do that since no command listed with 'help' can edit text files, and i can't do this under another os since it's a wubi installation
how to pass around that, any idea?

[bep]

I updated from 7.04 -> 7.10 -> 8.04, then got the busybox.

Could only boot from a fairly old kernel. Here is what fixed my problem:

First I removed splash/quiet from the boot options in /boot/grub/menu.lst. Then it was clear that Ubuntu for some reason now identifies my IDE disk as a SCSI device or something.

So I changed the menu.lst-item to this (/dev/hdc3 -> /dev/sda3 (my Ubuntu is on the fourth partition)):

kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-21-386 root=/dev/sda3 ro

I also edited /boot/grub/device.map:

(hd0)	/dev/hdc
(hd0)	/dev/sda

(Do not know if the last step is necessary.

And viola!

[the_darkside_986]

I am still getting BusyBox on 8.10 on a cheap Compaq Presario that has been able to run Windows XP, Windows Vista, and even older versions of Ubuntu without any issues. This happens before AND after replacing the IDE drive with an extra SATA I had. The BIOS doesn't support changing many options and Windows XP SP3 installed on the same machine without any issues, so the BIOS clearly isn't at fault. I should probably just give up and format the whole drive for NTFS anyway if it is a kernel problem until someone makes a distro containing an old stable kernel that Just Works (TM) suitable for desktop usage while running all of the latest free software.

[Cha-cha]

Here is how I fixed my initramfs and busybox problem.
First I noticed from my bios that my hard-drive was being detected as a secondary hard-drive (not primary). Many of the info here suggested that the initramfs issue has to do with the drives (hard, floppy, CD). I opened my computer, checked out the hard-drive and CD connection to the IDE. It turned out, just as the bios indicated, the hard-drive is connected as secondary IDE device. The cable I have has 3 connector--black (top) , grey (middle), blue (end). The label on my hard-drive says the grey connector is for secondary IDE devices. The original setup has the hard-drive connected to the the grey connector, while the CD-ROM is connected to the black connector and the black connector is connected to the IDE slot on the mother board.

I reconnected my devices as follows: black connector was connected to the hard-drive, the grey connector was connected to the CD-ROM and the blue connector was connected to the mother board.

The installation went very smoothly after the reconfiguration.

Note: my box had XP and I was able to boot with it, so initially, I didn't suspect I have a hardware issue.

[the_darkside_986]

I've already tried two different SATA slots but I'll try the remaining later. But still, if Ubuntu 8.04 and earlier can find the drive, there is no reason the newest shouldn't be able to. They should quit introducing fatal bugs into the OS for no good reason.

[bibloks]

Ok Guys,
For the past week I have been unable to get Mythbuntu to install on my new made up system that I put together. I have read alot of this threads and have had to same problems as a lot of you. It was always, no matter what I tried,:

Busybox v1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3-5ubuntu12) Built-in Sheull (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs)

So finally, success!!!

These are my specs:

Xpci- ATI HD 2600 Pro Super
PCI - Broadlogic 2030 card
PCI - Vision Plus 1020a Digital Satellite TV card
PCI - Firewire / USB card and
USB - Genpix board

Motherboard: Asus A8V-XE

Memory: Rosewill DDR400 512mb model: RW 400/512 (4 x 512 = 2 gigs)

Hard Drive:

80 gig-7200rpm Western Digital #WDC WD800JD-(This drive has got Windows xp and want to erase and install fresh'Mythbuntu' system)

500 gig-7200rpm Western Digital #WDC WD5000KS (New)

Video Card: Palit Radeon HD 2600 Pro Super

DVD/CD: Samsung DVD Writer (BG68-01353A Rev. 02)
Artec DVD Writer (Vom-12E48X)Motherboard: Asus A8V-XE
Memory: 2 gigs
Hard Drive:

This is what I had to do:

Installed Ubuntu 7.10 as it saw everything with no problem. Next, I rebooted and inserted the, Ubuntu 8.04.1 (AMD 64) and whe it goes to the graphical menu, hit <F6> for "other options" and you'll see the kernel boot line and at the end you'll see a ' -- ' and the cursor will be placed just after the end of the line just after the ' -- ', just add 'all_generic_ide', without the quotes, and press the 'Enter' button on the keyboard.

It went to install Ubuntu 8.04.1 and after installation, reboot and insert the Mythbuntu 8.04.1 and it will install that.

I know it is a very long rout to get to install Mythbuntu but it worked for me. I am very happy after going 1 week on a daily basis trying and trying that to install this.

I give credit to whomever posted about the 'all_generic_ide'. That did for me.

Hope it works for someone else---Oortism

Please mate how did you manage to instal PCI - Broadlogic 2030 card?
I am trying to get this card to install and read in the net bunch of articles but I cannot find driver anywhere, the one I found are old and are for redhat!

I have installed mythbuntu 8.10, still did not configured anything in mythtv as I want to have DVB initially installed.

PCI - Broadlogic 2030 card is visible by the system as netowrk card when i lounch hardware testing but its not dvb.

Can you guys help me on this, need to know is this old card still can be runned with mythbuntu 8.10

Thanks

[Gralgrathor]

I have a similar problem with installing the 8.10 32-bit livecd.

I have a simple machine, 32 bit architecture mainboard, dual core Intel cpu, 4 sata channels, 2 IDE, to which I added an additional 4 IDE channels using a PCI IDE controller. The machine came with a Samsung 500G SATA drive (ch. 1/4), and I added 2 WD 1T SATA drives (ch. 2 and 4/4), and 2 older WD 500G IDE drives (those last two I plugged into the PCI controller, both as master).

The base install works like a charm. I just enter through the program, sacrifice my entire (hd0) 500G SATA drive to the "guided partitioning" process, remove the CD, hit enter - and -

End of story. The thing won't boot no matter what I do. The machine just stopped dead right after the POST check.

So here's what I did: I re-installed Debian, my previous installation, using the same harddrive, and told the installation program to tweak the MBR and /boot partition (why doesn't the ubuntu install livecd have nifty options like that? sure, the installer is easy to use - unless it doesn't work!). Then I re-installed ubuntu, again using (hd0).

Now, at boot, at least I got the grub menu. But keying enter got me in the BusyBox. The UUID its trying to boot from is wrong. So I rebooted and got myself into a grub commandline, to try some stuff. I couldn't get it to boot no matter what "root (hd#,#); setup (hd#)" or what UUID I entered.

I did discover one thing though:

Debian assigns a completely different range of drive numbers to my drives than ubuntu.

My machine has 3 SATA drives, and 2 IDE drives on a plugged in PCI IDE card. It also has a combination card reader internally on USB. It's starting to look like with ubuntu, the cardreader or USB devices are numbered as the first 4 SCSI devices, while the SATA and IDE drives are given drive designations higher than those. I want to install ubuntu to the same disk Debian was first on: the first sata drive - but apparently my BIOS, Debian and Ubuntu *all* have different ideas as to which drive is which.

Haven't tried switching BIOS to RAID yet - and I don't see why an off-the-shelf install CD should require somebody to radically alter their system hardware config anyway. Besides, I would like to make try and the machine a dual-boot, so I cannot willy nilly change system parameters, or something else will not boot.

I will try to add the "noapic" option to the kernel parameters at my next install attempt. I have tried the "all_generic_ide" option, but that just got me loads of "Input/output-errors."

I'll add another post if my attempts at installing this thing succeed. The machine's been offline for 3 days now. If I don't get the server to run within another day or so, I'll probably revert to Debian permanently, and to hell with the TV-card.

Yo!

G.

Addendum I:

Users have reported slower than normal detection of SATA hard drives on systems with Intel D945 motherboards in Ubuntu 8.10. This may cause the system to drop to a busybox initramfs shell on boot with a "Gave up waiting for root device." error. Wait a minute or two and then exit the initramfs shell by typing 'exit'. Booting should proceed normally. If it doesn't, wait a bit longer and try again. Once the system boots, edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add rootdelay=90 to the kernel stanza for your current kernel. (Bug 290153: https://launchpad.net/bugs/290153).

I'll try this as well: might be that the UUID is not wrong, but that my mainboard has an unsupported chipset, even though it is an MSI mainboard. At some installation attempts I got the message "... doesn't exist" and in some just timeouts, so it's worth a shot.

G.

[iamah]

I believe I'm getting this wrong UUID error because my sata disk is at a secondary slot, due to my VGA being too big I can't use Sata primary slot.