Ubuntu
initramfs-tools package

  1. Bug #778520
  2. Comment #0

Comment 0 for bug 778520

Revision history for this message
xor (xor) wrote : Fresh natty install on raid1 does not boot, drops to initramfs shell

Yesterday I did a fresh install of Natty amd64. I used the PXE installer so all packages are up to date right after installation.

I partitioned the disk to have two software raid1 devices. One for swap, one for / with xfs.
Installation completed successfully, grub was installed to MBR.

The system has a >95% failure rate in booting.
At first it would hang on a purple screen. I blindly typed "reboot" at this screen, which worked. So I figured out that it would boot to a shell but not show it.
Then, I added "nosplash" to the kernel command line and removed "quiet".

This revealed that the system drops into a BusyBox shell labled "initramfs" when booting fails.
Unfortunately, I cannot tell whether it shows any errors on screen because the BusyBox shell resets the screen buffer, CTRL+PageUp does not work.

Please help me how to figure out what is wrong. Either tell me which log file I can search for the very first booting messages OR release a package update which fixes the screen-clearing of the initramfs shell.
If you do that I will take the effort of doing the 10-20 boot attempts to get to the point where I can update the packages...
If the initramfs-boot-process is logged anywhere I can check the log files without getting the system to boot through a bootable USB stick...