Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 810659
iso image in boot partition cannot boot
Last modified: 2013-02-13 09:13:01 EST
Hi Folks, Years ago I wanted to install Fedora which was distributed as a DVD but I had no DVD burner... So, I developed the technique to copy the iso to my boot partition, copy the selected vmlinuz and initrd.img from the distro isolinux directory, and run vmlinuz with the associated anaconda initrd.img, and Voila! Fedora comes to life. These days, optical readers are not necessarily going to be present in the lightweight net books and such, but USB is always present, so there is still a need to do this. The syslinux stanza looks like this: LABEL Install MENU LABEL ^Install / Upg Fedora-16 KERNEL /Fedora/16/isolinux/vmlinuz INITRD /Fedora/16/isolinux/initrd.img APPEND lang=en_US keymap=us Today, I tried a similar technique to boot a Live image from my boot partition of my traveling USB disk. I suffered obstruction from dracut. Description of problem: dracut won't boot an iso image from the boot partition of a disk. How reproducible: 100% Steps to Reproduce: I tried two techniques: First Technique - vmlinuz0: LABEL Fedora-16-Live-LXDE-32 MENU LABEL Fedora 16 Live (LXDE-32) KERNEL /Fedora/16/Fedora-16-i686-Live-LXDE/vmlinuz0 INITRD /Fedora/16/Fedora-16-i686-Live-LXDE/initrd0.img APPEND rdshell Note: the iso image is located in the same directory as vmlinuz0 and initrd0.img. This technique fails before any graphical activity: [ 2.340273] generic-usb 0003:0627:0001.001: inout,hidraw0:USB HID v0.01 pointer [QEMU 0.11.0 QEMU USB Tablet] on usb-0000:00:01.2-2/input0 [ 2.426719] dracut: dracut-013-18.fc16 [ 2.544125] dracut Refusing to continue [ 2.554336] dracut Warning: dracut; FATAL: No or empty root= argument Second Technique - memdisk: LABEL Fedora-16-Live-LXDE-32-memdisk MENU LABEL Fedora 16 Live (LXDE-32) KERNEL /syslinux/memdisk INITRD /Fedora/16/Fedora-16-i686-Live-LXDE.iso APPEND iso raw This technique fails after the graphical load screen starts and the progress bars are midway and the "Fedora 16" message in the lower right corner has displayed: dracut Warning: No root device "live:/dev/disk/by-label/Fedora-16-i686-Live-LXDE.iso" found the second technique drops me into a debug shell, but I don't know what to do or what to find, so I await your instructions. Actual results: See above in Steps to Reproduce Expected results: Live media should boot and run as though I had the optical CD in a CDROM. Additional info:
This message is a reminder that Fedora 16 is nearing its end of life. Approximately 4 (four) weeks from now Fedora will stop maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora 16. It is Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no longer maintained. At that time this bug will be closed as WONTFIX if it remains open with a Fedora 'version' of '16'. Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' to a later Fedora version prior to Fedora 16's end of life. Bug Reporter: Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we may not be able to fix it before Fedora 16 is end of life. If you would still like to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version of Fedora, you are encouraged to click on "Clone This Bug" and open it against that version of Fedora. Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's lifetime, sometimes those efforts are overtaken by events. Often a more recent Fedora release includes newer upstream software that fixes bugs or makes them obsolete. The process we are following is described here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
Fedora 16 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2013-02-12. Fedora 16 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.