[arch-general] Can't boot, root device not found

[Thomas Bächler]

Am 19.03.2012 17:44, schrieb Josh Silard:
> Thanks for the help. Does anybody know if there is a way to do this without
> a CD because I have no way to burn one right now.

No. Apparently, some part of your initramfs got borked after the
upgrade, so you cannot access anything. It depends on what is broken.

Check 'lsmod' in your ramfs environment.

1) If your drivers are not loaded, you can try loading them manually
(for example: modprobe ahci; modprobe sd_mod for modern SATA
controllers) and see if /dev/sd* appear. If that is the case, you can
mount /dev/sdXY /new_root manually, log out and your system SHOULD boot.

This can be the problem when udev inside the initramfs doesn't work anymore.

2) If they are loaded, but your sdXY still don't show up, then the
kernel upgrade broke your driver. No way to fix that without a live
system, as you cannot access your hard drive.

3) If they are not loaded, and not present in initramfs
(/lib/modules/...), then your kernel modules were not included, you are
out of luck again.

4) If they are not loaded, and trying to load them with 'modprobe'
yields "command not found" or similar, the same, you need a live disc.

There could be more problems. If we could communicate live, I could
probably tell you what's wrong within a few minutes.

Now, you can provide me as much information as possible (sorry, you'll
have to type this into your phone manually), such as:

1) The output of 'lsmod' (first column suffices, you could even omit
everything that has an entry in the last column).
2) The output of 'ps' (omit everything in [square brackets], so there
should only be like two or three entries).
3) An overview of what's in /lib/modules/*/, as well as the name of the
folder in /lib/modules/ - also compare that folder name to your uname -r
output. By "overview", I mean just the names of the .ko files, in
particular, whatever is under kernel/drivers/).

If you give me all that, plus a rought overview or picture of what
happens on your screen before the error message, I can tell you what's
wrong and how to fix it.

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