I foolishly installed the newest kernel update… now I can’t boot anymore.
Once I rebooted, grub presented me it’s friendly console. I’ve used the installation DVD to check the boot partition, everything ok, except menu.lst and menu.lst.old having a size of 0 bytes …
which only leads to a kernel panic, since the given ‘root’ parameter seems invalid:
VFS: Cannot open root device “system/root” or unknown-block(0,0)
Please append a correct “root=” boot option; here are the available partitions:
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)
…
All that seems wrong so far is the absence of any valid menu.lst. On the other hand, this is my first machine using lvm and dm-crypt(or something else?) and I don’t know the right kernel command line
Can anyone give me a hint on what parameters are needed?
The setup (created by 11.3 installation GUI):
hda1 /boot
hda2 LVM
hdb1 LVM
Both LVM partitions go into the volume group ‘system’, to be mounted as follows:
/dev/system/root /
/dev/system/swap swap
/dev/system/home /home (crypted)
Hmm, /boot/ on root partition completely empty … actually, the update wrote the kernel and initrd onto the boot partition, and set up the right symlinks, but completely killed the menu.lst, so that partition was mounted on /boot correctly.
Yeah, I usually prefer simple setups too
First step would be to tell the kernel that the root partition is in the volume group ‘system’… I’ve tried root=/dev/system/root and root=/dev/mapper/system-root, no luck so far… most probably there will be missing some luks entries when the home partition needs to be mounted… I’m a complete novice concerning lvm and dm-crypt…
so, now I’m able to boot, except being unable to reach runlevel 5 … I recreated the initial ramdisk.
In case anyone else needs this:
Boot a rescue system
mkdir /newroot
mount /dev/system/root /newroot
mount -o bind /dev /newroot/dev
chroot /newroot /bin/bash
mount /dev/sda1 /boot
mkinitrd
reboot
Now the crypted home partition can’t be mounted … I’ll get myself another coffee, I can’t imagine being the only one with a more esoteric setup messed up by the security update… if anyone else succeeds earlier, let me now
Can anyone paste a standard menu.lst from a standard openSuSE installation, I’d like to fix things up as closely as possible… most probably I’m still missing some options.
…