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

[Dylan Beaudette]

On Tuesday 25 July 2006 13:24, Ken Bloom wrote:
> 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

Thanks Ken. Sage advice. I made the changes.

Cheers,


-- 
Dylan Beaudette
Soils and Biogeochemistry Graduate Group
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341