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View Full Version : Booting remaster from SATA disk -Can't find root filesystem!



whohelhee
10-19-2006, 03:12 PM
Hi all (long time Knoppix user first time poster)!

Finally got round to trying remastering as per:

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Knoppix_Remastering_Howto

All my work is on a new 9GB ext3 partition which I mount (from within Ubuntu) as /dev/sda9. Only differences are that while I have directories master & source, the ./source/KNOPPIX directory is actually at ./ (i.e. at root on the partition). I plan to build the compressed KNOPPIX image there and then copy it to ./master/KNOPPIX before ISO making. I can then chroot into ./KNOPPIX just fine (to check that it does actually works!).

This is done (as suggested in the wiki HOWTO) since I would also like to try and boot directly into the newly remastered source (as a easy way to test), and since in order to do this Knoppix apparently expects a KNOPPIX directory to be at / on the partition in question.

I copy the ./master/boot directory as boot.knoppix to my boot partition, and then add the following lines as suggested to GRUB's menu.lst:


title KNOPPIX
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot.knoppix/isolinux/linux 2 fromhd=/dev/sda9 lang=us
initrd /boot.knoppix/isolinux/minirt.gz

NOTE: I have two disk on my system: one IDE (hd0) and one SATA (hd1)! Partition zero (as seen by grub) is my boot partition.

When I reboot, the kernel comes up just great – but it bombs out (after the USB and firewire checks) because it “Can't find the root filesystem�!

This then is my problem: the KNOPPIX kernel can't find my remastered source partition with the KNOPPIX directory at the root!

Looking at the kernel boot with dmesg – all the SATA disks seem to be found OK. However – and this is where my knowledge is scarce - I suspect there is some subtlety in how they are actually mapped through the nvidia raid module. This is particularly evident if I boot from a KNOPPIX CD – because all my hard-disks (apart from hda) don't appear on the desktop, but are listed under /dev/mapper/nvidia_ggdccbeh*. Urghh!

Trying in desperation to modify the GRUB entry to point: fromhd=/dev/mapper/nvidia_ggccbeh9 doesn't seem to work either!

Any more ideas? (I don't just want to make a new hda portion and do my work there).

Cheers!