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

[Jayesh Badwaik]

On Monday 19 Mar 2012 18:03:11 Thomas Bächler wrote:
> 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.

He can do it without a CD alright, can't he? He has access to a computer, so 
most probably to a USB drive? He can use unetbootin to boot into USB. That is 
how I install my archlinux (My laptop DVD drive ditched me two years ago.) 
-- 
Jayesh Badwaik