Hmmm... problem solved it seems. OK, maybe I should withdraw my query for reopening, and apologies for annoyance... I think we have experienced a different problem although it looked the same : there may be several problems which can lead to the symptoms of the initial bug-report.
The problem seems to have been caused by the lack of /dev/null and /dev/console created on the root partition (the partition was accessible, having the scsi driver loaded ok, but /dev empty). The previous configuration operated on a 2.4.27 kernel actually used a devfs, I think, so we beleived the devices where there on the root partition whereas they weren't. Creating the devices solved the problem. Maybe the /dev missed the devices since it was installed with a beta installer ? Also we were a bit mislead as believing this was specific to this machine type and hardware since it happend on a Poweredge 2650 too. But actually it's just a problem of /dev lacking console and null on the disk. For the records, it was mentioned in the threads that this has something to do with the aic7xxx SCSI disk driver. But some of the PowerEdge 2650 servers are shipped with the Perc 3/Di controller which requires the aacraid driver... so it may not be a problem with the aic7xxx driver in the initrd image. Anyway, if someone looks for information on that issue, here are some hints. While trying to figure out what went wrong, I read several pages: The problem is very close to this bug (initrd-tools) http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=271038 : helped to disgnostic what went wrong : "debugging you could set BUSYBOX=yes and DELAY=5 in /etc/mkinitrd/mkinitrd.conf" Same solution may apply too... The solution was described in the UDEV primer at : http://webpages.charter.net/decibelshelp/LinuxHelp_UDEVPrimer.html#consnull : "If this is a new install and configuring it for a Pure UDEV system, or you get an error when you finally reboot after installing udev and setting it correctly like this: WARNING: Unable to open an initial console. It is because there is no /dev/console and /dev/null. What is happening is that /dev/console is needed before udev is populating the /dev folder. You can try this by manually deleting all static devices in /dev folder from another system, then rebooting to the udev system. You will get the console error. You will also notice that it is faulting at a time before it normally loads udev. If you just make /dev/console though it will then fail for /dev/null. So it needs both of those static in /dev, at least for the time being. The fix for now is to manually create them in your /dev folder. cd /dev mknod -m 660 console c 5 1 mknod -m 660 null c 1 3 This will create the /dev/console and /dev/null statically in your /dev folder." Also there was a discussion about that issue in the thread starting here : http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0410.1/0608.html I'm not sure I got it right, but I think this suggests that maybe the initrd init process may not depend on the presence of null and console on the disk ? ... If by bad luck these happen to be removed (or never created ? ... installer's fault ?), we tend to be in bad situation. Hope this helps and sorry again for unnecessary annoyances. Best regards, Le jeu 09/12/2004 à 13:25, Olivier Berger a écrit : > We had the same problem as reported, and it's still there in the latest > 2.6.8 kernel packaged by Debian (testing). > > The prebuilt kernel image fails to boot on our Dell PowerEdge 2650 > servers. > > The error we get is /dev/console not found and init failed. > > > > We tried the 2.6.8-1 in the -10 revision both with 386 or 686 (and with > SMP too) versions, and it fails on /dev/console and /dev/null not > found/writable (sorry, no way to copy/paste the kernel messages) > > Just after having detected the SCSI (right after this kind of messages) : > > Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 > SCSI device sda: 430071552 512-byte hdwr sectors (220197 MB) > Partition check: > /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 p2 p3 p4 < p5 p6 p7 p8 > > > we get the errors on dev/console and dev/null... then init killed, and > the machine is frozen... > -- Olivier BERGER <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF INT Evry (http://www.int-evry.fr) OpenPGP-Id: 1024D/6B829EEC
