On boot, Debian shows a prompt: wait 5 seconds, or hit enter for a shell prompt. On my system, if I hit enter I get a shell prompt but none of the commands work (everything: not found). Anyway, if I then exit the shell, it eventually says cramfs: wrong magic and kernel panic: unable to mount root fs blah.
But if I don't drop to the shell, don't touch anything, it still says cramfs: wrong magic, but boots anyway without any panics. What's going on?
First, it is unnatural for Debian to cry in such a manner. Please let me know the version number of your distro. I think you have used dselect to change your kernel.
One more thing, Satya your machine isn't in trouble. It's just that sometimes automation doesn't work as desired. Nothing is perfect ;).
Regards,
ah
On Jun 8, 2003 at 09:19, Amol Hatwar wrote:
Version number? It used to be 3.0r0 but after a few apt-get upgrades, who knows?
I think you have used dselect to change your kernel.
Yes, 2.4.18-k6 is the kernel according to uname.
One more thing, Satya your machine isn't in trouble. It's just that sometimes automation doesn't work as desired. Nothing is perfect ;).
Yes, I know that. I'm just wondering why dropping to a shell causes the kernel to be unable to access the root fs?
Dear Amol,
I've stopped getting mail from the list since 26th Jun. I sent a test mail to the list & It wasnt sent back to me (thru the list).
Whats happened? Am I unsubscribed? Do I subscribe again ?
PS: I'm sending a copy of this to Amol's email ID in case the list is not getting this.
Thanks, --Royce.
Hi,
Interesting question, had fun looking up why so..., see below.
On Sat, 7 Jun 2003, Satya wrote:
Debian apparently uses cramfs for their initrd. Your initrd is loading, but your linuxrc.conf within initrd probably has a (configurable) 5 second delay before it times out and proceeds with rest of the boot. You choose to go to the shell (/bin/dash). The initrd has very little stuff in it, as it should be, so no normally expected utils are there. mount, umount, modprobe, echo and some others should work. When you exit, drivers for your root filesystem are not loaded hence kernel panic.
when you let it timeout linuxrc runs rest of the fun stuff, to load your root fs drivers through /sbin/init.
The "cramfs: wrong magic" error is probably because /sbin/init tries to mount your root filesystem as cramfs. See /sbin/init
For all the fun stuff above, do something like, mount -o loop -t cramfs /boot/initrd.img-<kernel-version> /mnt/tmp_mnt/ and walk through linuxrc and init.
Best regards, Rajesh
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Amol Hatwar -
Rajesh Deo -
Royce & Sharal Pereira -
Satya