waiting for root file system... ...

[abcc]

i am a linux newbie. i have installed knoppix on a logical partion and grub on / . it used to boot smoothly but now it doesn't. when the booting starts everything goes normal as before but stops in between as shown below.

success: loaded module raid 6
md: raid 10 personality registered for level 10.
success: loaded module raid 10.
done.
warning: missing mdadm.conf file, trying to create one...
success: mdadm.conf created.
begin: no arrays found in config file or automatically.
failure: failed to assemble all arrays.
done.
done.
begin: waiting for root file system... ...


it halts here. no furthur processing is done. what could be the problem and how to solve it.

please help....

[hal8000]

You're not going to like my answer, but here it is.
Knoppix is designed as a live cd, and as such it is a pretty formidable tool in the right hands, it takes time to learn, and if you picked up a guitar, no one would expect you to play like Eric Clapton the first time you used it....... the same with linux, you have done well to install knoppix on your hard drive, but there are some flaws with the distro (easily corrected if you not a beginner).

It will be a struggle for you to repair this, the best advice is to boot with the live knoppix cd, put in a flash drive and back up your data onto the flash drive then reinstall knoppix.

For a newbie, the easiest distros are Mandrake (now mandriva), Suse and Ubuntu. If you like kde, you may also like kubuntu, search on google for these, each distro is free to download.


"i have installed knoppix on a logical partion and grub on /" Some more help for you, you can have extended partitions and logical drives, ( a logical drive is the windows term for an extended partition). You can only have 4 primary partitions, on a hard drive, to have more partitions, one of the primary partitions must be made an extended partition. The extended partition can then be divided into even more "logical drives" or extended partitions.
Windows assigns the primary partition as drive "C", the next available (recognised) drive will be displayed as "d" which can be a primary or extended partition.

http://www.ntfs.com/logdrives.htm

In linux device labelling is much simpler.
A hard drive (ide , umda, pata ) is signified with the letters HD followed by a letter to indicate its connection on the hard drive controller ( A for master on IDE0) and then a partition number. Hence if you talk about /dev/hda1 or /dev/hda5 everyone knows
you are talking about the primary partition on the first hard drive as master on IDE0 and the first extended partition of the same drive respectively.
Not sure where you installed it from your post but again using th live knoppix cd, open a terminal, type su, (return) then
fdisk -l /dev/hda

This will list your partition table. You can copy by selecting with left mouse button and paste with the middle mouse button into an email, example:

root@orac:/home/anc# fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 163.9 GB, 163928604672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 7649 61440561 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 * 7650 8669 8193150 bf Solaris
/dev/hda3 8670 10194 12249562+ a5 FreeBSD
/dev/hda4 10195 19929 78196387+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 10195 10204 80293+ 83 Linux
--snip--

You can have many complex schemes, but it takes time to master.
Your problem by the way, could be a change to a partition or another hard drive or as the message is related to RAID, a problem with a RAID controller, either way, there will be no simple solution, and its easier to reinstall. Hope that helps.

[abcc]

Thanks very much for your reply....

but it is quite complex to understand for a beginer. however i'll try one of the distros u have suggested. but yesterday i downloaded PLD Linux. what are your views about PLD. should i format linux partition and reinstall pld instead of knoppix.

[hal8000]

Thanks very much for your reply....

but it is quite complex to understand for a beginer. however i'll try one of the distros u have suggested. but yesterday i downloaded PLD Linux. what are your views about PLD. should i format linux partition and reinstall pld instead of knoppix.

I never heard of that distro until now. I looked its website up, its RPM based and the forum is mainly Polish, so your support may be limited (unless ypu are Polish).

For a beginner, you need a distro thats as easy as possible, so I would take a good look at the websites and screenshots of the major distros, such as Ubuntu, Suse and Mandria first.

Hope that helps

[abcc]

Thanks hal8000....

i'll go for mandriva.

Thanks once again.