Dear friends,
I have a system whose configuration is as hereunder:
AMD Sempron processor 2800+ with 1 GB of RAM and two hard disks, one of
120 GB and the other of 320GB.
The partitions are as follows:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 2432 19535008+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 2433 4864 19535040 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 * 4865 7296 19535040 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda4 7297 14593 58613152+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 7297 7420 995998+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda6 7421 9852 19535008+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/hda7 9853 12284 19535008+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/hda8 12285 14593 18547011 83 Linux

Disk /dev/hdc: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdc1 * 1 25496 204796588+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hdc2 25497 38913 107772052+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

I have three operating systems in the partitions mentioned below:

/dev/hda1 RedHat Enterprise Linux 5
/dev/hda2 Fedora Core 7
/dev/hda3 Windoze XP

Today, while trying to boot into Fedora Core 7, the system could not boot and the following message was spit out.

mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root'
setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory
kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

The kernel version of Fedora Core 7 is 2.6.21-1.3194.fc7. Is there any way to set the system right and boot into Fedora Core 7 ? Thanks in advance.

Yours faithfully,

talpa_sai

I suggest that you boot into Red Hat, mount /dev/hda2 on a spare mountpoint and fix Fedora from within Red Hat. Be sure that any changes you make are to Fedora and not to the equivalent Red Hat files.

Check /dev/root. It should be a symbolic link to /dev/hda2.

Check /etc/fstab. It should contain an entry mounting /dev/hda2 as root.

Then check the /boot/grub/menu.lst file that grub is actually using when you boot. You may have a /boot/grub/menu.lst in both Red Hat and Fedora but grub only uses one of them when you boot. Check the active menu.lst to see if the root partition for Fedora is correctly specified as hd0,1.

-----------------
Steve Stites

Dear jailbait,

Forgive me for addressing you without the prefix Mr./Miss/Mrs., as I don't
know whether you are a man or woman.

Further, your reply/suggestions proved infructuous. As you know, only active OS's, i.e. OS's that've booted will only have entries in the /dev
directory. Consequently, after mounting /dev/hda2 on /mnt/fedora, I
cd to /mnt/fedora/dev/ and I don't find any entries in /mnt/fedora/dev/.
As regards the entry in /etc/fstab, I did not understand what you meant by
"It should contain an entry mounting /dev/hda2 as root". Assuming that this /etc/fstab you talked about refers to /mnt/fedora/etc/fstab, there is no such entry. I request you to enlighten me as to how to make an entry in /mnt/fedora/etc/fstab "mounting /dev/hda2 as root".

Regarding entries in /boot/grub/menu.ist file, they're given hereunder.

title Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (2.6.18-8.el5)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-8.el5 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet crashkernel=128M@16M
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-8.el5.img
title Fedora-base (2.6.21-1.3194.fc7)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7.img
title Win XP
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
chainloader +1

I hope they're correct and in order.

I also ran the command "fsck.ext3 -fv /dev/hda2 after ensuring that /dev/hda2 is unmounted. Still, there is no salvation for me with this problem. Please give your views/suggestions. I hope I am not troubling you.

Yours faithfully,

talpa_sai

hi sai garu


change the LABEL=/ to /dev/hda2

after mounting your fedora / partition into /mnt/fedora

u should find /mnt/fedora/etc/fstab
which looks like

now change LABBEL=/ to /dev/hda2

and boot into it

if this is not fixed

see what is there in /boot/grub/device.map file in RHEL5 .....

Did your multi-OS setup use to allow you to boot into each individual OS before?
If so, what changed?
What OS did you previously boot into, before you tried FC 7?

The reason I ask is because I too had a multi-OS setup where I had a problem (awhile back) where I booted into XP and I had a problem that required a hard reset.
My problem was that the hard reset or XP (more likely) did something to the partition table that prevented me from booting into anything other than XP.
Unfortunately, I do not recall what I did to fix it (as it happened several years ago).
But it was a simple fix that did not require a re-install of anything!

I take it you tried booting off a linux rescue disc and running fsck?
How about qtparted (??) to see if there is anything funny about the partitions?
Tried "SystemRescueCd" at http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page, it has alot of utilities!