For the past week I have not been able to get my SLES box to boot fully. The boot process gets to the splash screen presenting me with the option of booting SLES 10 or the FAILSAFE system. If I select either the boot process will only go so far and will stop with the error of “waiting for /dev/sda1 to appear …exiting to bin/shell” I can manually mount the partitions from the rescue system but that’s as far as I’ve gotten.
Is there a way to manually boot the OS the rest of the way from the rescue system ?
So if we can assume that the Grub boot loader is OK, you can get this message if you added in a new hard drive, that might change the drive designations or you might get this error if the SuSE partition has become corrupted, such as might happen when you had a sudden power failure at the wrong time. The last Time I had this happen, the PC power supply had went bad and after replacing it, this is the first message that greeted me after the first restart. I ended up reinstalling SuSE. Tell us of any events since the last time you were able to boot SuSE correctly that may have occured.
One of the drives had failed but the raid is divided into two virtual drives among 12 disks all running a raid5.
fdisk -l
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1304 10474348+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1305 1566 2104515 82 Linux swap / Solaris
You must set cylinders.
You can do this from the extra functions menu.
Disk /dev/sdb: 0 MB, 0 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 267350 2147483647+ ee EFI GPT
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
phys=(0, 0, 1) logical=(0, 0, 2)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
phys=(1023, 254, 63) logical=(267349, 89, 4)
cat menu.lst
title SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16.46-0.12-smp root=/dev/sda1 resume=/dev/sda2 splash=silent console=ttyS0,9600n8 console=tty0 showopts
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.16.46-0.12-smp
###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
title Failsafe – SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16.46-0.12-smp root=/dev/sda1 console=ttyS0,9600n8 console=tty0 showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off noresume nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 edd=off 3
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.16.46-0.12-smp
To know for sure, we would also need to look at your /boot/grub/device.map file. If you had a drive fail and now it will not boot, might the SuSE load be messed up now since it does not work and may require you to reinstall SuSE?
Your Device Map looks correct to me. When you get the error message “waiting for /dev/sda1 to appear …exiting to bin/shell”, the partition “/dev/sda1 * 1 1304 10474348+ 83 Linux” as listed by the **fdisk -l **is failing to mount and so the kernel can not be loaded. I am not sure what else we can say about this issue. I think you could search for the GParted boot disk, download the iso, burn a boot disk then boot and run from it to see if it contains a utility that might allow you to fix the /dev/sda1 partition, but reloading SLED is looking more likely to me.