Unable to find volume group "hda2"
ALERT! /dev/hda2 does not exist
And then I'd be dropped to a Busybox shell.
Lots of looking around on Google produced nothing. Some people had similar problems but they all came back to lilo, and I wasn't using lilo. I finally subscribed to the ubuntu-users mailing list and sent out my info, and this morning I was given the pointer that lead to fixing it.
Unfortunately I'm not quite sure exactly what fixed it, but I think I have enough that anyone else who encounters this will be able to retrace my steps.
It appears that the problem was the newer kernel's initrd was missing some crucial module.
/etc/mkinitrd/mkinitrd.conf
says MODULES=most
but I'm not sure where that list is defined, but if you run mkinitrd
with the -k
it leaves its temporary files around you can see the modules.most
file it left behind.The two changes I made were:
- Adding
reiserfs
to/etc/mkinitrd/modules
- Copying
reiserfs.ko
andatiixp.ko
(gimme a break, I was just guessing) to/lib/modules/2.6.12-9-686-smp/initrd
initrd
properly -- the problem was that you have to use an absolute path for the output file when you run mkinitrd
, like this: mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd.img-2.6.12-9-686-smp 2.6.12-9-686-smp
.It's been so long since I messed with any of this stuff that I'm hazy on how it works. This makes me sorta happy, really -- I ought not to need to know. Though it makes me even happier that I still have the opportunity to be able to fix it.