LiveCD boot fails, drops to BusyBox: "No init found"

[Billy Charlton]

Daily live installer CD fails to boot. Karmic nightly, cd dated 20090929.2. This worked (it booted) OK using live CD from 20090923.

Immediately upon livecd kernel boot, system drops to BusyBox prompt with error messages:
  "Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init. No init found. Try passing init= bootarg."

I tried passing ACPI=off cmdline argument, no effect. Also tried adding break=top, then modprobe piix and modprobe ata_piix. No effect.

System:
Dell Optiplex 960, 4Gb RAM, with Intel ICH10 ide (fakeraid) controller.

Will try and add suggested text dumps from guidelines, but not sure if those cmds are available from BusyBox.

[Billy Charlton (billy)]

uname -a:
Linux (none) 2.6.31-11-generic #36-Ubuntu SMP Fri Sep 25 06:37:51 UTC 2009 i686 unknown

cat /proc/version_signature:
Ubuntu 2.6.31-11.36-generic

dmesg:
41k of output; if someone knows how to mount a usb stick from BusyBox I will happily provide it

sudo lspci -vnvn:
lspci: not found

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

Thanks for your report. Please boot with the "debug" boot option. In the busybox shell mount first identify your USB drive:
 ls /dev/sd*
It will probably be the device with only one partition, for instance /dev/sdc1. Now mount it:
 mkdir /tmp/mnt
 mount -t vfat /dev/sdc1 /tmp/mnt
And copy your dmesg and casper.log on it:
 cp casper.log /tmp/mnt
 dmesg > /tmp/mnt/dmesg.txt
 umount /tmp/mnt

[Billy Charlton (billy)]

Wow you have *no* idea how many hoops I had to jump through to get these two files. Many rebel fighters died to retrieve these stolen plans! :-)

Attached: casper.log and dmesg.txt.

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

Well, as long as no kittens were hurt :)

Thanks a lot for the effort. This is the piece that explains what happens. It is a known problem, and I have posted a patch for it, just need some core developer to rubber-stamp it.

+ is_nice_device /sys/block/dm-3
+ sysfs_path=/block/dm-3
+ /lib/udev/path_id /block/dm-3
+ grep -E -q ID_PATH=(usb|pci-[^-]*-(ide|scsi|usb)|platform-orion-ehci|platform-mmc|platform-mxsdhci)
+ return 1
+ [ ext4 = squashfs -o ext4 = ext4 -o ext4 = ext3 -o ext4 = ext2 ]
+ ln -s /dev/mapper/isw_bfdafeice_ARRAY5 /dev/mapper/isw_bfdafeice_ARRAY5.ext4
+ echo /dev/mapper/isw_bfdafeice_ARRAY5.ext4
+ return 0
+ livefs_root=/dev/mapper/isw_bfdafeice_ARRAY5.ext4
+ [ /dev/mapper/isw_bfdafeice_ARRAY5.ext4 ]
+ break
+ [ -z /dev/mapper/isw_bfdafeice_ARRAY5.ext4 ]
+ [ ]
+ [ ]
+ [ ]
+ mount_images_in_directory /dev/mapper/isw_bfdafeice_ARRAY5.ext4 /root