I attempted to upgrade my main workstation to Fedora Core 6 this weekend.
The upgrade itself went smoothly enough – I think. The new packages appear to be installed…
There’s just the small matter of being able to boot the thing. I’ve got a Linux Software RAID system. All of the partitions are RAID 1 on SATA. I’ve got /dev/md0 as the /boot partition, and /dev/md3 as /, /dev/md6 as /home, etc. – point being, it’s all RAID, see?
I remember this being a pain back in FC3 days, but I managed to get it working by installing GRUB on the MBR of both disks. This time, no dice.
If I boot into a rescue mode from the FC6 DVD, I can run grub:
grub> find /grub/stage1 hd(0,4) hd(1,0) hd(2,0) grub> device (hd1) /dev/sda grub> root (hd1,0) grub> setup (hd1)
This all works. Unfortunately, on boot, I find that it won’t find the kernel image.
I’ve edited grub.conf and told it that root=/dev/md3. Interestingly, on booting without the DVD, hd(0,0) is really the first SATA device, so I edited grub.conf to use fully-qualified paths to the boot graphic and kernel file – I know this got me further, as I started seeing the FC6 graphic GRUB screen when the machine started. However, I still get an error 15 (file not found) when it tries to load the kernel.
Gaaah. I hate GRUB. Why doesn’t this just work? I spent an hour twiddling with options on Saturday, but right now, I just can’t get anywhere 🙁
Thanks to Kelly for the inspiration for the title of this post…
Have you tried hitting ‘e’ at the grub prompt and using the autocomplete ‘tab’ key to check the file paths are correct?
GRUB is far superior to LILO in this respect, as you can adjust the boot paramater without having to grab a boot disk/cd (which can sometimes show the drives in a different order to what GRUB sees)
Yes, I’ve tried that.
It looks like I did have the root wrong – should be hd(0,0) and not hd(1,0).
I can then get further, but get errors about unknown symbols in scsi_mod.ko, sd_mod.ko, and various sata modules – and then the kernel can’t mount the root partition.
It works fine booting from the CD in rescue mode.
I suspected that the kernel was wrong, but it looks like it had successfully installed the i686 kernel RPM (uname -a reports an i686 arch).
Baaah!
[…] 24th, 2007 · No Comments Back in November, I made a hopelessly failed attempt to upgrade my main Linux workstation from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 6. This is a machine that I […]