My Dell PowerEdge SC430 has a SATA controller that takes ~30sec to start - it fails to reset the secondary controller (which has nothing attached), the kernel waits a bit, and then it moves on. Unfortunately this delay seems to cause the initramfs /init to die, saying: "Bug in initramfs /init detected. Dropping to a shell. Good luck!"
I think I know what the problem is here; saw it on OLPC a month or two back... but am probably not using sources that includes this fix... give me a few hours to do a LiveCD respin with this bugfix.
Please try build3 available from here this machine on the RH intranet http://172.16.83.66/~davidz/ Thanks.
No love. Here's the relevant kernel messages (with quiet turned off): ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xFE00 ctl 0xFE12 bmdma 0xFEA0 irq 225 ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xFE20 ctl 0xFE32 bmdma 0xFEA8 irq 225 scsi0 : ata_piix ata1.00: ATA-7, max UDMA/133, 488281250 sectors: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32) ata1.00: ata1: dev 0 multi count 8 ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 scsi1 : ata_piix ata2: port is slow to respond, please be patient ata2: port failed to respond (30 secs) ata2: SRST failed (status 0xFF) ata2: SRST failed (err_mask=0x100) ata2: softreset failed, retrying in 5 secs Bug in initramfs /init detected. Dropping to a shell. Good luck! bash: no job control in this shell bash-3.1# ata2: SRST failed (status 0xFF) ata2: SRST failed (err_mask=0x100) ata2: softreset failed, retrying in 5 secs ata2: SRST failed (status 0xFF) ata2: SRST failed (err_mask=0x100) ata2: reset failed, giving up I'm guessing that /init is not honoring the kernel's request to "please be patient". heh.
Does it write no root yet, udev rule will write symlink... waiting up to 60 seconds before dropping to emergency shell Getting all the messages would be useful... any chance you can hook up a serial console and use console=ttyS0,115200 on the commandline (without quiet). Or any chance you can hook up one of those fancy devices so I can VNC into it? Thanks!
Created attachment 143012 [details] screenshot of waiting for rootfs If you can take a picture of the screen, much like the attached (where I changed the CDLABEL on purpose), it would be useful. I'm also curious if the system waits at all. Thanks.
Created attachment 143087 [details] "screenshot" of some kernel messages leading to init bug I get the 'waiting for system to settle' message, but not the "no root yet... waiting up to 60 seconds" one. The failure seems to happen after the first 30-second wait for ata2. Here's a screenshot with a bit more context (before the messages listed in comment #3).
Messages after the "please be patient" one are the same as above.
Mmm... this is very weird. Tell me, what is the output of 'ls -l /dev/root' when you get the emergency shell? Thanks.
Will and Bill told me this is fixed now so closing.