[vox-tech] debian mess: after dist-upgrade machine does not boot!

[Ken Bloom]

On Wednesday 31 December 1969 17:59, Dylan Beaudette wrote:
> Well damnit.
>
> After doing a couple upgrades, and then moving to X.org, 2.6.16
> kernel, and the new NVIDIA drivers, I thought that I was going to be
> ok after an aptitude dist-upgrade....
>
> Things were working fine, until I started monkeying around with sound
> modules. Somehow KDE was breaking the snd-intel8x0 kernel module...
> but this is a side story. After getting fed-up with the sound issues,
> I rebooted the machine. About half-way through the boot sequence, the
> message: "Begin: waiting for root file system..." and then nothing.
>
> Fortunately I have an older Knoppix CD, that I am currently using to
> boot the machine, and write this email. Everything looks fine on the
> HD, but I knoticed one thing. In /boot/grub/menu.lst I see that:
>
> title		Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.16-2-686-smp
> root		(hd0,2)
> kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16-2-686-smp root=/dev/hdc3 ro
> initrd		/boot/initrd.img-2.6.16-2-686-smp
> savedefault
> boot
>
> I have a serial-ATA drive in this machine, and since kernel 2.6 this
> drive has appeared as a SCSI device. I think that aptitude must have
> changed the values in the grub configuration so that:
> root=/dev/sda3 ------> root=/dev/hdc3
>
> I am hoping that this is the reason that my machine is not booting.
> If so, is there anyway to make aptitude remeber that my root drive
> should be on /dev/sda3 ???
>
> Ok. crossing my fingers, and re-booting to see if this fixed
> things...
>
>
> Dylan

Debian's kernels run update-grub to update your grub configuration every 
time you upgrade kernels. This causes the stanzas referring to your 
kernels to be overwritten.

The proper way to change kernel parameters in Debian grub is to edit the 
commented line that starts "# kopt=" (do not uncomment) and then run 
update-grub which will propagate the new kernel parameters to the 
kernels.

--Ken Bloom
-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/
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