New root hard drive hangs on boot

GTBlackwell · 11-15-2008, 02:58 PM

This is a continuation of the thread at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...rouble-683597/

I have two questions:

1) Is there a way to force Ubuntu to boot without the splash screen? I might be able to solve the problem on my own if I could see the output.
2) Can I use dmesg to get the log of the last boot off the hard drive while logged into a LiveCD session?

nilleso · 11-15-2008, 04:40 PM

1) edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and change the kernel line(s) to change splash to nosplash and add verbose.
example:

Code:

kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=abc123 ro ht=on nosplash vga=775 verbose

note there are other cleaner ways of updating menu.lst by including the options in the Default options lines and using update-grub,,,, You can read more into that

2) just mount your HDD and view the /var/log/dmesg file ... same thing as the dmesg command.

cheers

CJS · 11-15-2008, 10:07 PM

I think the easiest way to prevent the splash screen and see all the booting messages is to simply remove the "quiet" and "splash" screen at the end of your kernel line:

Code:

kernel		/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=d0b10c15-66ed-4d1c-b7f6-c1fc131636f7 ro quiet splash

Give that a shot and let me know if it is what you are looking for.

GTBlackwell · 11-16-2008, 04:25 AM

Well, unfortunately, dmesg didn't provide me with anything useful. Gedit refused to read it and I tried to pipe it into a text file and that caused the system to hang. Maybe I just don't have the hang of how that file's supposed to be used.

Anyway, I made the suggested changes to menu.lst and managed to figure out precisely where my system is hanging, but not really how to go about fixing the problem. When booting into Hardy normally, some initial text output appears, but before I could read it the spash screen was back, but this time with the following at the bottom:

Code:

Loading essential drivers...       OK
Running /scripts/init-premount...  OK
Mounting root file system...       OK
Running /scripts/lolcal-top...     OK
Waiting for root fs...

which I guess means the root files system never really got going. So I tried booting into recovery mode via the grub menu and I get a ton of output scsi and usb drivers. The system hangs just after USB HID is accessed.

Is there something I skipped that I should have done after I copied the contents of the old hard drive onto the new one? If all the system files are in the same place, shouldn't it not care whether or not it suddenly has more space?

jlinkels · 11-16-2008, 10:04 AM

This thread provides you with some information about how to find the cause for this kind of trouble.

Although this thread is about boot problems after upgrading a kernel, the mechanism to find the cause is the same. You *have* to boot into the initramfs OS to find why you cannot boot from you regular hard disk. Dmesg and rescue mode in Ubuntu or not good enough. I just hope that like Debian, Ubuntu falls back into busybox when it doesn't boot. Initially it takes not less than 5 minutes or so.

BTW, my bet is that you have run into problems because you are not mounting the new drive using label or UUID. Google for a solution, there are sufficients HowTo's on that.

jlinkels