[PLUG] booting troubles for a knoppix/HD install

Russell Senior seniorr at aracnet.com
Mon Aug 9 22:13:02 UTC 2004


It seems like it booted okay the first few times, but now I am having
trouble.  This is an off-site box that is usually a windows machine,
but I set it up to dual-boot recently so that we could use some linux
tools on it and now I want to use it as a node on my parallel
processing cluster.

It is a Knoppix 3.4 hdinstall (or whatever the command was, about a
month ago I installed Knoppix on the harddisk) that I subsequently
updated using apt with the default /etc/apt/sources.list.

It seems that /proc isn't getting mounted early in the boot and the
root partition ends up mounted read-only.  Strangely, "mount" shows
them rw, but I can't write until I explicitly "mount -o remount,rw /".
The missing /proc (and read-only / ?) causes all hell to break lose.
I can recover when I am on-site by mounting proc and the remount as
above, modprobing e100 and ifup'ing eth0.  Sad thing is, I am not
on-site very much, and I am going to have to rely on a windows monkey
to reboot for me as needed.  I'd really like it to come up cleanly.
Since / isn't writable, I am not seeing any helpful messages in the
log files.

I suspected an initrd problem (particularly since I haven't tended to
use them before and I might be doing something innocently
disasterous), but my grub menu.lst looks appropriate-ish:

  title   Linux (2.4.26)
  root    (hd0,2)
  kernel  /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.26 root=/dev/hda3 ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off nomce quiet
  initrd  /boot/initrd.img-2.4.26
  savedefault

I am currently building a new custom kernel with appropriate drivers
compiled in (thus causing the initrd need to go away), but can anyone
tell me what the problem might be?  This is a new one on me.


-- 
Russell Senior         ``I have nine fingers; you have ten.''
seniorr at aracnet.com




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