Ubuntu
initramfs-tools package

  1. Bug #32123
  2. Comment #0

Comment 0 for bug 32123

Revision history for this message
Caleb Moore (c-moore) wrote : Cannot find ide hard disk on boot

After upgrading to dapper drake (through a dist-upgrade) and rebooting, my system did not start up.

I got the following message:

Decompressing Linux...Done
Booting the Kernel.
ALERT! /dev/hda1 does not exist. Dropping to a shell.

After this I was presented with the standard busybox shell and after checking the /dev directory of the initial ramfs root I noticed that there was indeed no /dev/hda1 or any /dev/hda for that matter.

As a bit of personal speculation, I think that it might be a problem with the associated initrd not having the ide drivers accessable or maybe something about its device nodes. I notice that the latest package of the amd64 kernel at this time (2.5.15-15) does not have inbuilt ATA drivers like breezys did and I think there might be a problem getting them loaded up properly.

I built my own kernel and initrd image with ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL (IDE), Enhanced IDE/MFM/RLL disk/cdrom/tape/floppy support (BLK_DEV_IDE) and Include IDE/ATA-2 DISK support (BLK_DEV_IDEDISK) as inbuilt options and it booted fine.