Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 21318
Bootup halts on init
Last modified: 2014-03-16 22:17:24 EDT
I did a workstation install onto my PIII/450 w/ 128mb and a Toshiba MK2016GAP. I partitioned it with Partition Magic such that hda1->3Gb ext2, hda2->128Mb swap, hda3->extended, hda5->FAT32. I installed Redhat 7 just fine and could boot up fine but then I moved the hardrive into my Netpliance I-opener. I used to have Redhat 6.2 working in the I-opener but decided to get a bigger hard drive and upgrade. Now it will boot up and gets to VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly. Freeing unused kernel memory: 64k freed. and then hangs. I've tried using init=/bin/bash, init=rc.sysinit, and init=/sbin/init but none made any difference. I have the basic MS-DOS system files on hda5 and the dos lilo option will boot dos fine.
What happens if you try 'init=/bin/ash.static'?
it gets to: VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly. Freeing unused kernel memory: 64k freed # and then fails. The "#" sign is new.
That's not failing - that's a shell prompt. :) Unless you're saying the machine is hung at this point?
If it's not hung, what happens if you run: /bin/bash from that shell prompt?
It says # /bin/bash Illegal instruction
What kind of processor is in the iopener? What most likely happened is that when you installed the drive, the i686 glibc package got installed. This package contains instructions that won't run on less than a PPro.
BTW, you can tell what architecture glibc you have by running: rpm -q --qf "%{ARCH}\n" glibc
Well that makes sense because I'm pretty sure its a Rise mp6 200Mhz processor (i586). If that's it then what steps do I need to do? Just remove the i686 glibc rpm and install the i586 glibc rpm?
i386 glibc RPM actually (there's only an i386 and i686; adding specific i586 optimizations doesn't actually help any), but yes, that's what you'll have to do.
You'll also want to check to make sure you aren't running an i686 kernel (although that would be likely to die a lot earlier in the boot sequence...)