had to use rootdelay with SCSI drive to boot on ubuntu 8.10. any ideas why?

rizwanrafique · 02-22-2009, 05:22 AM

I installed ubuntu 8.10 on a computer with scsi drive the other day. Upon first boot it dropped back to BusyBox shell complaining of something like:

Code:

ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxx does not exists. Dropping to a shell.

BUSYBOX v.x.yy.z

Providing it rootdelay=<seconds> did the trick and it booted flawlessly. But I'm confused. rootdelay (AFAIK) is for USB (and similar) root(s) that take slightly longer to get ready. Why did I have to use it on a SCSI drive? Did I probably do something wrong during partitioning? Or SCSI need some extra mounting parameters?

I partitioned using Ubuntu's default graphical partitioner during installation and created a /root (ext3, 20G), /home (ext3, 50G), swap ( ~3G).

Any ideas?

alan_ri · 02-22-2009, 07:41 AM

Actually,a man who wrote a rootdelay patch said;

Quote:

My patch added a rootdelay kernel parameter, which allows the user to specify a delay (in seconds) that the kernel should wait before trying to mount the root device.

where you can see that he didn't said USB device,he said root device.Also he said;

Quote:

As of Linux 2.6.10, the USB flash storage initialization changed, and a side effect of this made it no longer possible to boot Linux from USB flash like this. The change meant that, in situations like this, the kernel would try to mount the root filesystem (on the USB flash disk) before the usb-storage driver was fully initialized.

So,I guess that this is an answer to your question.Maybe you need a better SCSI driver for your hard drive or a better hard drive.