I have a system with a single IDE drive with a (ext3) boot partition and the rest allocated under LVM2, including a logical volume for a Fedora Core 4 root filesystem. That all works fine however I need to dual boot FC2 off the same system in order to test some software (Virtuozzo) that does not yet support FC4.

I created another logical volume for the FC2 root and installed it using yum. I tested the FC2 partition under Xen and it worked fine however the software I need to test uses a custom kernel so I need to natively boot the FC2 partition.

The kernel, initrd, etc. images from the /boot of the FC2 partition have been copied across to the real boot partition (as used by grub and Xen) and I have added entries to grub for the FC2 partition however the boot hangs with the following error messages.

Mounting root filesystem
mount: error 6 mounting ext3
pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
unmount /initrd/proc failed: 2
Freeing unused kernel memory: 164k freed
Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init=option to kernel.

I've spent the last hour or so Googling for a solution to no avail. Most of the replies suggest that it is because the root filesystem is ext3 but that the kernel does not have ext3 compiled in (even though the boot messages indicate that the ext3.ko module is loaded) and needs to so I switched the FC2 root to a ext2 partition but that has no effect. The other suggestion was that /initrd does not exist but it does on my FC2.

Even after changing the root filesystem to ext2 the mount error above still says ext3.

Thinking it may be something to do with the LVM (which I admit I don't know a whole lot about), I copied the LVM config across from my FC4 root to my FC2 root (/etc/lvm and /dev/LogVol00) but the result is the same.

Does anyone know if what I am trying to do is possible and if so how? Or will I have to remove the FC2 logical volume, shrink my volume group, and add a new primary partition to the disk for the FC2 root?


Thanks in advance,


Dave Bonnell

Umm, which startup scripts are active? What I'm driving at is that you (or rather the kernel) have to activate LVM before mounting root. Wrong script (FC2) might not do it...

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