[RULE] Slinky and pivot_root problems

[Michael Fratoni]

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On Saturday 22 March 2003 09:17 pm, Brett L. Moore wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a Compaq Presario CDS 924 (486 with 16MB of ram) and am trying
> to install RH 7.3 (it has been running RH 7.0 for a couple of years).
> Initially, I tried miniconda v0.7.4 (boot.img with RH 7.3 ISOs on CD) -
> this version dies just after calling /sbin/loader.  Earlier versions of
> miniconda get further along, but ultimately tell me that I do not have
> enough RAM to install RH.  I have tried passing options in (i.e. "linux
> mem=16M", but always the same message.

Did you also use the updates disk (and boot the installer as "linux 
updates")? The updates disk contains the work arounds to defeat the hard 
coded memory requirements.

> I then tried slinky and appeared to have more success.  With slinky, I
> reformatted the drives and setup partitions (/, /boot, and /swap) -
> then the rpms installed from CD with no apparent problems.  Ultimately,
> the install tells me everything was fine and asks to make a boot disk. 
> I made a boot disk, then rebooted the machine.
>
> When it reboots, the boot process proceeds normally through hardware
> identification but dies a horrible death shortly after .  I see lots of
> "ext3 failures" and pivot_root messages, then "kernel panic: no init
> found". My uneducated guess is that /dev/hda1 (/boot) is not mounting. 
> I am using lilo, but the same errors are encountered if I use my boot
> disk.

It sounds as if the ext3 modules aren't being loaded for some reason.
Does the boot disk work? Can you use either the boot disk or the slinky 
boot disk to reboot the machine, create a mount point, manually mount the 
filesystems and get me a copy of the install log? It is in 
/mountpoint/root/scripts/install_log. The contents of 
/mountpoint/etc/fstab would be helpful as well. Perhaps the output of 'ls 
- -l /mountpoint/boot' as well, if you could.

It sounds as if either lilo failed (perhaps the installer got the config 
file wrong?) or the kernel package didn't install properly. (No 
/boot/initrd*.img created?) 

Either way, this should be recoverable, once we figure out what went 
wrong.

- -- 
- -Michael

pgp key:  http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/gpgkey.txt
Red Hat Linux 7.{2,3}|8.0 in 8M of RAM: http://www.rule-project.org/
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