[svlug] Problem with changing file systems

[Ira Abramov]

On Sat, 16 Mar 2002, Neil Kittipalo wrote:

> I ran into a problem doing the / partition. My setup was lilo on the MBR of
> hda and the / partition on hdg2. hda1 is about the same size as hdg2 so I
> thought to copy / over to there and run lilo so as to boot via the MBR to hda1
> which was formatted as ext3. All looked good with lilo -v -t so I went ahead.
> On rebooting however I got a kernel panic after a bunch of messages about
> being unable to find a reiserfs. I can't understand why it was looking for
> one. I ended up using a Linuxcare cd to get back to my old config.

well, that's just one of the reasons I like a seperate /boot and not
having to care about what's in my initrd. compile a kernel where
reiserfs and ext3 are native, and don't use an initrd. I suspect you
have lilo pointing at modules, images or initrd on the partitions you
format and are unavailable for the next boot.

final funny story: a friend of mine just got to a new workplace and was
given an old workstation for set up for himself. he fired up the RedHat
kickstart the company uses and installed the system. the installation
was botched, but the system loaded. when he looked to see which kernel
he was running, he could not find any kernel RPMs in the DB, and to his
complete astonishment, there was no lilo installed or images in /boot
(hda1). we finally had to agree that the MBR was not overwritten and
neither was the old boot image of the previous machine, although mke2fs
was run on hda1, but nothing written into it. Phantom of the boot
sector... the lucky part was that it was a kernel made by a guy who
didn't like loadable modules at all, so everything worked for several
hours before anyone noticed the machine booted without a kernel....

-- 
L'ombelico del mundo
Ira Abramov

http://ira.abramov.org/email/