Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 52232
Machine non-bootable after install finishes - can't mount fs
Last modified: 2008-08-01 12:22:51 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.3) Gecko/20010808 Description of problem: After a fresh install from the Roswell CD's, my machine can not mount the / file system and continue to boot - I get an error complaining about reading from hda. When booting in rescue mode, the file system gets mounted correctly and all appears to be fine. I've tried using the partition tables I had before (512mb swap / 4gig root), letting it repartition the whole drive, and each combination with each bootloader and ext2 vs ext3. All exhibitted the same behavior. Booting from a boot-floppy exhibits the exact same behavior This appears to be somewhat related to my hardware, as the same install worked fine on my laptop. The failing hardware uses an Abit BH-6 MB (BX chipset) and a Western Digital WDC AC35100L harddrive. The system runs RH7.1 without any issues. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Boot from install CD's 2.Do any install on machine 3.Reboot to run newly installed OS Additional info:
We (Red Hat) should really try to fix this before next release.
Can you be a bit more specific about the complaint it gives ? That might help me get an idea of where the problem can be.
I can try, but it means reinstalling the machine twice - hopefully I'll have time to take it down over the weekend. I'll try doing an upgrade first and see if I get the same problem, then a fresh install if the upgrade works. I should have taken better notes the first time - wasn't thinking straight. DOH!
Okay, I did another install (this time an upgrade) and got the same failure. The bootscreen messages show: ... Mounting root filesystem hda1: bad access: block=2, count=2 end_request: I/O error, dev 03:01 (hda), sector 2 EXT3-fs: unable to read superblock ... (and things go down hill from there :) Interestingly enough, I did a test install using the exact same system except a Quantum LCT15 drive, and everything was great. I remember seeing some info once suggesting some WD drives might have problems with DMA modes, though my 7.1 install had DMA enabled. Are the default DMA modes different than before, and could that explain why the system mounts fine when booted from the install or rescue disk, but poops out when running in 'normal' mode? Does that give you guys/gals enough to go on?
Could you try booting in rescue mode and install the 2.4.7 kernel from http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/testkernels/i686/ ? (you also need a mkinitrd in the "i386" directory one level up)
I'll give that a try in the next day or so. Unfortunately, this machine is my main work machine, so I have to have it running a usable OS (7.1) during the day hours. :) I'll see if I have a spare drive to make this process a bit easier.
I installed kernel 2.7.2-19 as requested and the system now boots fine. Thanks!
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/