Dapper fails to boot off second disk

[David Edwards]

I had SuSE 8.2 on /dev/hda2 on an old machine, and I installed Dapper (initially 6.04) on /dev/hdb2. I used lilo as the boot loader, on /dev/hda.

I attempted to boot into Dapper, and ended up with the Dapper kernel and my old SuSE 8.2!

The problem is on the initrd.img, in file scripts/functions.

The function parse_numeric does not correctly parse the root device number.

The following diffs show a fix that works for me. Sorry but I don't know which package was use to create the initrd.

--- functions_broken 2006-06-17 17:27:04.000000000 +0100
+++ fixed/scripts/functions 2006-06-17 17:27:49.000000000 +0100
@@ -239,10 +239,14 @@
   minor=${1#*:}
   major=${1%:*}
   ;;
- *)
+ ????)
   minor=$((0x${1#??}))
   major=$((0x${1%??}))
   ;;
+ ???)
+ minor=$((0x${1#?}))
+ major=$((0x${1%??}))
+ ;;
  esac

  mknod /dev/root b ${major} ${minor}

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

Dapper reached end of life some time ago, is this still an issue with 12.04+?

[David Edwards (se014a0001)]

Dear Phillip
_________________________________________________________________________
Phillip Susi wrote:
> Dapper reached end of life some time ago, is this still an issue with
> 12.04+?
>
>
> ** Changed in: initramfs-tools (Ubuntu)
> Status: Confirmed => Incomplete
>
_________________________________________________________________________
I haven't tried to boot Ubuntu off a second disk since my initial
experiments, when I was deciding whether or not to adopt it. However, I
can confirm that changes that have been made in the meantime to the
parse_numeric function in /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/functions
are functionally equivalent to my proposed fix, which did, of course, work.

Best regards

David Edwards
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[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

I suspected as much, thanks for confirming.