This bug started appearing when mkinitrd was updated to version 6.0.71-3.fc10.x86_64. When booting, I get "mount: unable to mount /dev/root as ext3: Invalid Argument" on the console. Removing the quiet option doesn't give a lot of extra information. FWIW, I saw this with kernel-2.6.27.9-159.fc10.x86_64 when I updated the system. Using the new initrd on an old kernel (kernel-2.6.27.7-134.fc10.x86_64) produced the same result as well. # cat /etc/fstab # # /etc/fstab # Created by anaconda on Thu Dec 18 14:37:39 2008 # # Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk' # See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or vol_id(8) for more info # UUID=a077bf66-f6c8-4fe0-a83b-59d53cdb3efe / ext3 defaults,relatime 1 1 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 I don't have any swap set up. This is a Lenovo X61 system. Suggest to pull the mkinitrd update from the updates repo until this is resolved.
Turns out this is caused by the 'relatime' option which I added some time before installing a kernel. Still, it's pretty bad that nash can't handle this, even worse that the error message isn't more helpful (EINVAL can mean pretty much *anything*). Also, at least the kernel and the standard mount command honors 'relatime' # cat /proc/mounts |grep /dev/root /dev/root / ext3 rw,errors=continue,user_xattr,acl,data=ordered 0 0 # mount -oremount,relatime / # cat /proc/mounts |grep /dev/root /dev/root / ext3 rw,relatime,errors=continue,user_xattr,acl,data=ordered 0 0
Also, ideally, crucial input files like /etc/fstab should be validated / sanity checked by mkinitrd before being put in the initramfs.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 430280 ***