Comment 12 for bug 664968

Nitesh,

Thanks for your instructions. Unfortunately they didn't help in my case, see below for details. Based on all I've described, I'm curious to know if this is a genuine bug in the Maverick ISO image or usb-creator-gtk, or if my netbook or the USB stick is defective. I'll be happy to do further experiments and debugging to find out the reason for this behavior.

$ sudo blkid
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="MAVERICK" UUID="091E-1A5F" TYPE="vfat"

(I set the label manually since it was gibberish after emptying the stick with usb-creator-gtk.)

The directory /boot/grub.d didn't exist on the stick, there was just /boot/grub/loopback.cfg. I created /boot/grub.d/40_custom with the following content:

menuentry "Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat" {
  set root=(hd0,1)
  linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-22-generic root=UUID=091E-1A5F ro quiet splash
  initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-22-generic
}

Booting off the USB stick still drops me into Busybox. The boot menu still has the original five items.

The stick doesn't contain /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-22-generic nor /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-22-generic. Instead, there is a /casper directory with:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 akaihola akaihola 38472 2010-10-23 11:45 filesystem.manifest
-rwxr-xr-x 1 akaihola akaihola 36500 2010-10-23 11:45 filesystem.manifest-desktop
-rwxr-xr-x 1 akaihola akaihola 10 2010-10-23 11:45 filesystem.size
-rwxr-xr-x 1 akaihola akaihola 692674560 2010-10-23 11:47 filesystem.squashfs
-rwxr-xr-x 1 akaihola akaihola 11409807 2010-10-23 11:47 initrd.lz
-rwxr-xr-x 1 akaihola akaihola 4289584 2010-10-23 11:47 vmlinuz

The first item in /boot/grub/loopback.cfg is originally:

menuentry "Try Ubuntu without installing" {
 linux /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper iso-scan/filename=${iso_path} quiet splash --
 initrd /casper/initrd.lz
}

I inserted a new first item:

menuentry "Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat" {
        set root=(hd0,1)
 linux /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper iso-scan/filename=${iso_path} root=UUID=091E-1A5F --
 initrd /casper/initrd.lz
}

This didn't change the boot menu, and the stick still drops into Busybox.

I also tried to tweak kernel options by hitting F6 in the boot menu and interactively inserting root=UUID=091E-1A5F or root=/dev/sdb1 into the kernel command line, but it had no effect.

While in Busybox, ls /dev/sd* reveals that the partition on the stick indeed is /dev/sdb1.