finnix hangs at "Looking for Finnix media at sda3..." when sda3 is an Extended partition

[Rey Tucker]

When booting on a machine with an Extended partition (i.e. old-school MBR container for logical partitions), the Finnix boot process hangs at:

[*] Looking for Finnix media at sda3...

I've run into this a few times in production, but have built a quick and dirty VM that can reproduce it. fdisk -l is as follows:

Disk /dev/sda: 8589 MB, 8589934592 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1044 cylinders, total 16777216 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0032c77a

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 2048 2099199 1048576 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 2099200 4196351 1048576 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda3 4196352 16777215 6290432 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 4198400 8392703 2097152 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 8394752 16777215 4191232 82 Linux swap / Solaris

None of the partitions are actually formatted yet; this did not seem to be necessary to make it happen. Finnix 104 boots fine, Finnix 105 does not.

I am running a finnix-hwsubmit from this VM as soon as I get an ID for this bug. :-)

[Ryan Finnie (fo0bar)]

Yes, this is a problem somewhere between BusyBox's mount utility and the kernel, but I'm not sure which side is to blame.

If you're booting by CD directly, there's a good chance you can pass "root=/dev/sr0" to the boot command line, and it will try that first, bypassing the automatic checks. Otherwise, it's recommended to just continue using Finnix 104.

[Ryan Finnie (fo0bar)]

This was apparently a kernel problem; Linux 3.5 fixes it.