Alan McKinnon writes:

> Apparently, though unproven, at 18:57 on Saturday 04 June 2011, Alex
> Schuster did opine thusly:

> > A mother board died, so I put the hard drives into an old spare PC,
> > rebuilt the kernel via chroot in order to include some necessary
> > drivers, and all was well. Until I plugged in the 2nd hard drive.
> > Then, the thing reboots after these messages:
> > 
> > [...]
> > VFS: Mounted root (ext3 filesystem) readonly on device 8:6
> > Freeing unused kernel memory: 304k freed
> > kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
> > 
> > Instead, I think init should start. When I unplug the drive, it boots
> > fine.
> 
> Most obvious things first:
> 
> What does the system present that BIOS as?

Hmm, I cannot parse that sentence. The BIOS shows the identical SATA drives 
as 3rd and 4th master devices. These are the only hard drives

> Is it now trying to boot off the second drive?

No. sdb5 is a clone of sda5, but an older version, so I know that sda5's 
Grub is running. It loads the right kernel (there is no initramfs), then 
reboots. And even if the root=/dev/sda6 kernel parameter would find the 
wrong drive, it should just boot, as sdb6 also is a valid root partition 
(it's a rdiff-backup of sda6).

For the moment, I unplugged the backup drive. I also had to add a --partial 
to the vgchange command in /lib/rcscripts/addons/lvm-start.sh, so the init 
script would not return an error because of missing physical volumes for a 
volume group that spans both drives. Which looks like a bug to me, I think 
this init script should be more tolerant.

I may get another PC as replacement soon, so maybe this problem will go away 
then. It was working well in the old PC, the only change I made was to 
compile a new kernel, because the current PC has other IDE hardware than the 
old one.

        Wonko

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