boot into suse 12.1 fails(waiting for device)

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I have a multi boot box with grub2 installed on the mbr of /dev/sdc. Suse and Ubuntu and are on /dev/sdc. Win XP is installed on /dev/sdd. The drives /dev/sda and /dev/sdb are data drives.

When I installed suse12.1, I went in to ubuntu and did a gurb update and I have been able to boot into suse. There is an issue that when I boot into suse, I get the following,

resume device not found (ignoring)
waiting for device /dev/sdc3 to appear
want me to fall back to /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC… (Y/n)

When I enter Y, suse will boot. Why there seems to be an issue finding the drive is unclear to me.

Today, it will not boot into suse when I enter Y. I get a “waiting for device”, but it never finds anything. I know the drive works because ubuntu is on the same drive and it boots with no issues.

A while ago I had a problem and moved my hard drives to a PCI sata controller card. When I did that, I was not able to boot into anything any more. I used boot-repair and was able to boot back into windows and ubuntu. I didn’t try suse at the time, so I don’t know if this problem is a hold over from the problem I repaired with boot-repair or not.

I have run the boot info script, but apparently this forum does not support attaching files or including such a large file in the body of the message. If anyone wants some information from the script output, let me know and I will try to post what you need. The script seems to indicate that I have grub installed on the mbr of the windows drive as well as sdc. I am surprised at this because I am sure I removed all copies of grub except the on I installed with ubuntu.

Any suggestions on how to get back into suse? Is this an issue of suse not having the drivers for my PCI sata card?

LMHmedchem

2

So, when a /dev/sdc3 fails and a /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC… works, then the device, at least when installed, was not actually /dev/sdc3. Further, at least on a default install of openSUSE, the fatab and device.map entries are based on /dev/disk/by-id/ and not the other unless a modification has been made. So, why not give up a copy of these files while running openSUSE? Open up terminal and type in these commands and post the results in a message here:

sudo cat /boot/grub/device.map
cat /etc/fstab
sudo /sbin/fdisk -l

Thank You,

3

At this point, I am not able to boot into opensuse at all. I was able to a while ago, but now the by-id method fails as well.

I can boot into ubuntu and probably access files in the suse install. If you list the files and locations, I will make copies and post them.

It looks like you want,
/boot/grub/device.map
/etc/fstab

will the fdisk -l output from ubuntu suffice, or does it need to be from inside suse. I suppose I could boot suse from the dvd, is that what you meant in the first place?

LMHmedchem

4

We can probably fix it from Ubuntu.
Here’s what I need:

  • post the entry booting openSUSE in the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg in Ubuntu, meaning these couple lines:
menuentry "openSUSE something..." {
....
....
}


blkid

As soon as we find out in which partition is openSUSE, mount this partition in /mnt

sudo mount /dev/sd?? /mnt

and post the content of openSUSE’s /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst:

cat /mnt/etc/fstab
cat /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst
5

When you install openSUSE or another OS, you should not reformat the swap partition if it is shared with other distros. If you do, its UUID will change and other OSes (such as Ubuntu) which refer to this partition by its UUID in /etc/fstab and in Grub menu (in the resume option) won’t find it anymore.

  • Unfortunately, it’s not always possible not to reformat the swap partition. But it’s possible during openSUSE setup, if you choose the Expert partitioning.
6

Thanks for the advice about not reformatting the swap. I don’t think I selected to reformat the swap. I normally create a new dedicated swap for each new install, but it seems as if the suse installer identified the swap partitions that were already there. I don’t recall if the install summary said it was going to use these as swap, or format them as swap.

I needed to compile something in suse last night, so I just re-installed. There was nothing in the install, since I keep my data on other partitions, so there was no loss other than the time to run the installer. I had it install grub1 on the mbr of sdc. I was able to boot into suse.

I have a question about my shared data partition (the one I share with windows and other linux flavors). The partition is named “share”. The last time installed suse, the share partition appeared in the file browser as one of the locations under computer. I was able to navigate to that location and run my make file. This time, the partition is mounted under windows/H. I think this was in dev/, and there were several drive letters, one for each of the partitions on the other drives in the box. I can navigate to the partition, but when I run make, I get a permissions error because make cannot write to the build directory.

I could use some suggestions on how to fix this. I don’t remember doing anything different during this install, so I’m not sure why the partition is mounting differently. I could just chwon/chmod the partition and acquire permissions, but I need this partition to be accessible from several different OSs. It seems like I should be able to do something with the group permissions that would give me access from essentially different users, like if the data was on a network drive or something like that. I really don’t know much about that end of linux, so I would appreciate suggestions. I guess I could also just log in as root, but I like to do things the proper way (if there is one), and that doesn’t sound quite like it.

Of course, I have messed up my grub2 install and I need super-grub2 to get into windows, so after I have finished my compiling, I will need to try to get my grub back in order.

Thanks for the help so far, I don’t know what I would do without help forums.

LMHmedchem

7

By default it will be mounted in the /windows directory unless you tell it otherwise. You can tell the installer the mount point you want or you can do it in the Yast-boot section or you can edit /etc/fstab file as root and fix it there.

8

The configuration file called fstab in tghe folder /etc (/etc/fstab) contains the mount points and permissions for all partitions automatically mounted for you are startup. By default, any Windows partition requires that you be root in order to write to them. You can edit this text file as root and restart openSUSE and get the ability to write to it and to mount it to any existing folder in your / root partition. Here is an example of how I mount my Windows partition:

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD3000GLFS-01F8U0_WD-WXL408720641-part2           ** /Windows **   ntfs-3g    **defaults   **         0    0

This is just one line of many in the fstab file and notice that I highlighted the mount point I use, in this case, the folder just called /Windows, I use the options command called defaults in place of the much longer string placed in there for you. To edit this configuration file in KDE, I use the command:

Alt-F2: kdesu kwrite /etc/fstab

or in gnome you can use the command:

Alt-F2: gnomesu gedit /etc/fstab

The folder must exist that you name. For instance, I could open up a terminal session and type the command:

sudo mkdir /Windows

The folder Windows should not exist before I make such a command to create it. Folder names are case sensitive and so I would have to enter Windows and not windows to get to it.

Thank You,