unable to access sda2 on boot

[Tim]

On Thu, 2007-04-05 at 19:05 -0400, Peter Ebert wrote:
> First off, I'm running Fedora Core 2.6.20-1.2925.fc6
>  
> I had everything running semi smothly on a new intel board, found out
> that my cd problems were caused by the board, so I swapped for an old
> abit aw8-max, everything else remaining the same.
>  
> When I tried to boot, after "Red Hat Nash version 5.1.19.0.3 starting"
> I get the error:
> "Unable to access resume device (LABEL=SWAP-sda2)"
> "mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root'"
> Then a series of errors that I assume are a result of not being able
> to mount these partitions?

Depending on how things were previously connected, taking all drives
into consideration, you might need to fiddle with the device names in
the grub.conf and/or fstab files.

GRUB's root(hd0,0) starts counting from zero from the first hard drive
it finds.  That's drives, not ports, it doesn't count unused ports.  If
you've got past the point of the GRUB menu, and Linux is starting to
boot, with *all* the starting .... messages, not just an attempting to
start sort of message, that part of things is set right.  So it's not
grub.conf that you need to play with, probably the fstab file.

Linux is different from GRUB, it counts devices from the ports, whether
or not a drive is plugged into them (/dev/hda, /dev/hdb, /dev/sda, etc.,
being predictable port locations, they don't change).  You could *try*
changing any fstab swap lines from using a label to a device name.

e.g. from LABEL=SWAP-sda2    swap     swap    defaults        0 0
     to   /dev/sda2          swap     swap    defaults        0 0

Having a BIOS that lets you swap boot drive order can muddy the waters,
as some things may seem to be different devices pre-boot than post-boot.

The resume message means the system couldn't find the drive partition to
resume from, or didn't find anything on that partition to resume from
(it's not waking up from a hibernation).  The first part may be due to
your labelling not being readable, or the partition device may need
redoing in fstab (sda becoming sdb, or something like that).

I seem to recall the unable to find /dev/root being related to the root=
part of the kernel line in the grub.conf file.

title Fedora Core (2.6.20-1.2925.fc6)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.20-1.2925.fc6 ro root=LABEL=/
        initrd /initrd-2.6.20-1.2925.fc6.img

You might want to try the same trick and use root=/dev/sda(whatever)
instead of root=LABEL=/.

All in all, this sounds a little like you've got GRUB installed on
drive, but the OS on the other.

> I put in the install disk I used, and run "linux rescue" it
> succesfully detects the install, and i think it mounts ok (little
> fuzzy on what that means exactly but I didnt get any errors geting to
> the rescue shell)  When I get to a command line i type the only
> command i can think of "fdisk -l" and see the drives detected
> correctly and the partitions on them listed correctly as well.

You probably should have posted that information, here.


-- 
(This box runs FC6, my others run FC4 & FC5, in case that's
 important to the thread.)

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