Comment 11 for bug 29858

I'm trying to boot Ubuntu from the boot partition set up by my primary Fedora Core 5 installation, where Ubuntu is installed (via the alternate install iso) on an LVM partition as a secondary Linux distro.

I had tried multiple things to get Ubuntu to boot on my system and finally arrived at copying the Ubuntu kernel and initrd to the same /boot set up by FC5. Ubuntu is installed on VolGroup00/LogVol03. My grub kernel root statement is root=/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03/. The boot kept hanging at "Waiting for root file system". I followed the advice of threads in the Ubuntu forums and waited. I then got a message that /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03/ does not exist, and the initrd brought up a shell with BusyBox.

Just before hanging there was a mesage that four partitions were now active in VolGroup00.

I looked at the /dev of the initrd, and there were /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03 and /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol03. So the root filesystem is really there! I then created a mount point /mnt/ubuntu and tried to mount the filesystem. It kept telling me the filesystem didn't exist until I tried "mount -t ext3 /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03 /mnt/ubuntu" and it mounted. So it isn't detecting the filesystem type, needs to be told what it is, and is giving a misleading message that the root filesystem simply doesn't exist.

Now the issue is how to tell the kernel that the filesystem is ext3, just like I did with the mount from the initrd. I have tried to add various statements such as rootfstype=ext3 to the kernel statement in grub, without success. I tried it in various places on the line (e.g., before and after the root= statement) with no success. I tried a statement rootflags="-t ext3" but that didn't work either. I also tried rootfstype statements with ext3fs and ext2 without success.

Apparently the boot process is correctly recognizing and setting up the lvm partition, but is somehow failing to recognize and mount the file system there.