Booting problem, initrd

Drassk · 01-22-2005, 04:06 PM

I recently started using Ubuntu and last night (since last reboot) I'd installed the nVidia drivers. I played Enemy Territory and afterwards I tried to open Firefx and it would just act like it was loading (in the taskbar) and then close itself. I tried to right-click and close it in the taskbar, and it locked up my system (solid, no CTRL-ALT-Backspace or anything).

I think it must have corrupted something because now when I boot I get this error on the third line:

"Cannot find initrd device"

and further down I get

"t_console_fd: no such file or directory"
and the same for "get_console_fd: no such file or directory" (<-- IIRC)

and, finally, it reaches
"Setting up ICE socket directory" and locks up solid

I tried booting in with the Ubuntu CD and mounting my root partition (which worked) but when I try to use aptitude to reinstall packages it continually complains about the telnet package or somesuch. This is as far as I can seem to get on my own. Anyone know anything that can help? I found this guy when I searched for the first error on Google, but it doesn't seem like he actually resolved the problem (and my french is a little choppy). It won't let me post the URL but just look up "Cannot find initrd device" (in the quotes) and it's the only result on Google.

Any help would be appreciated greatly. I have a lot of work saved on that partition so a wipe and reinstall would be a huge hassle so there must be some way to salvage my install without resorting to that.

-Drassk

deoren · 01-23-2005, 08:04 PM

Have you done the usual things such as checking your memory with memdisk and your hard disks with either dd if=/path/to/hd of=/dev/null or with the utilities from the manufacturer of your drive (www.ultimatebootcd.com rocks)?

I'm thinking somebody else will probably ask, so I might as well get it out of the way.

Drassk · 01-23-2005, 09:57 PM

I ended up just throwing the important stuff on another partition and reinstalling after wasting a bunch of time trying to fix it. I'll have to run those checks anyways just to make sure it won't happen again, but it seems like it's rare enough that the odds are it's an (almost) isolated incident.

kadissie · 03-06-2005, 02:56 PM

I'm having the same boot problem, and also not finding any answers.

I have just installed Ubuntu warty via the Knoppix Live CD today; install went fine, all the packages arrived in their places without a problem. Then I configured my apt sources.list and told it to go fetch me some kernel images, and I've ended up with both vmlinuz-2.6.8.1-3-386 and vmlinuz-2.6.8.1-3-686 and their corresponding initrd.img files in my /boot partition. I've got

Code:

root@Knoppix:/ # df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3             9.7G  457M  9.3G   5% /
devpts                9.7G  457M  9.3G   5% /dev/pts
tmpfs                 9.7G  457M  9.3G   5% /dev/shm
/dev/hda1              29G   23G  5.4G  82% /mnt/windows
/dev/hda2              99M   24M   71M  25% /boot
/dev/hda6             5.6G   33M  5.6G   1% /home

with

Code:

root@Knoppix:/ # cat /etc/fstab | grep -v ^#
/proc      /proc       proc   defaults            0 0
/sys       /sys        sysfs  noauto              0 0
/dev/fd0   /mnt/floppy auto   user,noauto,exec,sync 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom  auto   user,noauto,exec,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1  auto   user,noauto,exec,ro 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat defaults 0 0
/dev/hda2 /boot ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 / reiserfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5 none swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 /home reiserfs defaults 0 0

I've configured my grub with, for example,

Code:

title=Ubuntu 2.6.8 i386
        root (hd0,1)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.8.1-3-386 root=/dev/hda3
        initrd (hd0,1)/initrd.img-2.6.8.1-3-386

and likewise with the 686 image.

During bootup, I get an error complaining"Cannot find initrd device!" and then later it stops after saying something about unable to use resolv.conf or something like that. There are also miscellaneous errors to do with ext3 filesystems which I'll try to record next time.

Any ideas? As the chap mentioned above, trying "cannot find initrd device" gets you a googlewhack, and in French, which explains the problem but doesn't offer any advice.

R.