Freezed between Grub and Login. Hard drive to blame ?

Yesterday I just installed OpenSUSE 11.0 from a LiveCD in my Kohjinsha SC3, Poulsbo Grpahics, Silverthorne Intel processor, 1GB RAM, 60 Gb HD (Toshiba, SMART Technology). Because I had no CDROM, I had to use an external USB optical drive.

The installation was complete, no problems here, and the system installed GRUB as Boot manager. It’s a clean install, without windows Vista around it.

/dev/hda1 * (/)
/dev/hda2 (swap)
/dev/hda5 (exchange)

The important think is that hda1 is the / partition and in /boot there is the grub directory, all standard (i.e. default) distribution.

Detail: before the installation, in the LiveCD I had to load the “ide-core” and “ide-generic” modules. If they were not loaded before the install process, the install program did not see the main hard drive, and could not make the partitions.

After installation, the system reboots. The GRUB menu appears, with two options, the “Normal” boot and the “Failsafe” boot.

On both of them I reach a final message like that:

usbcore: registered new interface driver hiddev
input: dialogue inc penmount usb as /devices/pci bla bla bla. (this the tactil touchscreen, no proble, in the Live CD it worked)

usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid
drivers/hid/usbhid/hid-core.c: v2.6: USB HID core driver
…Could not find /dev/disk/by-id/data-toshiba_mk6028gal_48pbs47hs-part1.
Want to fall back to /dev/hda1 ? (Y/n)
y
Waiting for device /dev/hda1 to appear: …not found – exiting to /bin/sh

$ (shell)

After that I cannot continue to the login in Gnome.

Please, help. I tried another distro and the same happens. I would prefer to use OpenSUSE.

Thanks!

Hi & welcome!

First reason could be your partition layout somehow shifted or the drivers you mention are not in the initrd (the file that loads at boot containing the drivers you need to access the disk).

Have a look here for some ideas:
Good Things To Know When Imaging Linux To Different Hardware - openSUSE Forums
waiting for device /dev/sda2 to appear - openSUSE Forums

hope that helps!
Wj

Sangdrax wrote:

>
> Yesterday I just installed OpenSUSE 11.0 from a LiveCD in my Kohjinsha
> SC3, Poulsbo Grpahics, Silverthorne Intel processor, 1GB RAM, 60 Gb HD
> (Toshiba, SMART Technology). Because I had no CDROM, I had to use an
> external USB optical drive.
>
> The installation was complete, no problems here, and the system
> installed GRUB as Boot manager. It’s a clean install, without windows
> Vista around it.
>
> /dev/hda1 * (/)
> /dev/hda2 (swap)
> /dev/hda5 (exchange)
>
> The important think is that hda1 is the / partition and in /boot there
> is the grub directory, all standard (i.e. default) distribution.
>
> Detail: before the installation, in the LiveCD I had to load the
> “ide-core” and “ide-generic” modules. If they were not loaded before
> the install process, the install program did not see the main hard
> drive, and could not make the partitions.
>
> After installation, the system reboots. The GRUB menu appears, with
> two options, the “Normal” boot and the “Failsafe” boot.
>
> On both of them I reach a final message like that:
>
> usbcore: registered new interface driver hiddev
> input: dialogue inc penmount usb as /devices/pci bla bla bla. (this the
> tactil touchscreen, no proble, in the Live CD it worked)
>
> usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid
> drivers/hid/usbhid/hid-core.c: v2.6: USB HID core driver
> …Could not find
> /dev/disk/by-id/data-toshiba_mk6028gal_48pbs47hs-part1.
> Want to fall back to /dev/hda1 ? (Y/n)
> y
> Waiting for device /dev/hda1 to appear: …not
> found – exiting to /bin/sh
>
> $ (shell)
>
> After that I cannot continue to the login in Gnome.
>
> Please, help. I tried another distro and the same happens. I would
> prefer to use OpenSUSE.
>
> Thanks!
>
>

You mentioned that you needed to preload ‘idecore’ and ‘ide-generic’ to
allow your hard drive to be detected.

We need to cause them to be loaded at boot so that the drive will be seen
during booting.

There is a kernel boot parameter which might work, but I don’t know for
sure. Add this to the ‘options’ for the normal boot menu selection:

ide-pci-generic.all-generic-ide

(be careful of the dashes and the single dot in the middle)

This is supposed to cause all unclaimed IDE controllers to be picked up. I
have no idea if it’ll work or not.

If it DOES work, then edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add it to the normal and
failsafe entries. It should work from then on.

But if that doesn’t work…

If you can boot the system with a rescue disk, you could do something like
the following:

boot system with rescue disk
load ‘idecore’ and ‘ide-generic’ modules
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt
chroot /mnt bash
mount /dev
mount /sys
edit /etc/sysconfig/kernel
add ‘idecore ide-generic’ to the INITRD_MODULES line
save the changes
mkinitrd
exit
umount /mnt
reboot system
see if it boots properly now.

Does that make sense? Essentially, you’re using a rescue disk to get access
to the filesystem, chrooting into that filesystem, mounting /sys and /dev
which are needed, adding the two ide modules to the ‘preload’ list and
rebuilding the initial ramdisk (initrd) the system boots from during the
boot sequence.

This should fix the issue. Of course, if you were to reinstall OpenSuse
11.0, you could edit the ‘booting’ options to include the two ide modules
too. Which should add them to the initrd and do all this beforehand.

Whew!

Good luck sir! Hope this helps. (heck, hope it made sense!!)

Loni

L R Nix
lornix@lornix.com

And it looks like I’ve consistently mistyped ‘ide-core’ as ‘idecore’.
Please adjust accordingly. Sorry about that.

Loni

L R Nix
lornix@lornix.com