casper no longer wants to boot off HDD devices

[Mario Limonciello]

Some time in the last year or so casper appears to have stopped wanting to boot off HDD devices. It previously was able to by setting UUID= on the command line or by having a common casper-uuid-generic.conf to the initrd that was booted.

I've tried to narrow this down a little bit, and I believe the problem is in:

is_nice_device

Previously, udev would be queried to determine if the given device matched this path:

usb|pci-[^-]*-(ide|sas|scsi|usb|virtio)|platform-sata_mv|platform-orion-ehci|platform-mmc|platform-mxsdhci|platform-omap_hsmmc|platform-sdhci-tegra|platform-tegra-ehci

Unfortunately according to bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/1193705 the by-path mechanism used by udev no longer works.

This does match the behavior I see that the command in question in the busted initrd prompt doesn't output anything useful like it used to.

I've reproduced this using the 14.04 daily image from March 17th.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package casper - 1.339

---------------
casper (1.339) trusty; urgency=medium

  * scripts/casper: Fix for new udev that doesn't have by-path.
    Original patch from http://goo.gl/R76aKl (LP: #1293811)
 -- Mario Limonciello <email address hidden> Wed, 19 Mar 2014 09:22:38 -0500

[Dinesh (dinesh-k-pro)]

I have Dell Latitude e6500 Laptop, Core 2 Duo Processor. Fresh installation in a external HDD.

Ubuntu version 14.04 LTS ; Casper version is 1.340.2.

Unable to expand the persistent partition and struck in

dmar: IOMMU: failed to map dmar0
ACPI PCC probe failed.

BusyBox v1.12.1 (Ubuntu 1:21.0-1ubuntu1) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs) _