Upgrade 8.04->9.10 fails: crash to tty, claims can't mount rootfs

[Nils Kassube]

Dexter Filmore wrote:
> So today I finally decided to upgrade to 9.10 from 8.04.

> Now after rebooting the system crashed to a maintenance shell
> claiming the system wasn't able to mount the root fs.
> Funny thing here: / was mounted. could perfectly dive into the
> system, run programs and so on. Perfectly mounted.

Did you check that you really have your disk partitions mounted? The 
early startup part of the system uses the initrd which has a normal 
directory structure but it is located entirely in RAM without the disks 
mounted yet. And you have a very limited set of initial programs 
available which are also part of the initrd. I wouldn't expect a mounted 
disk partition if there is an error message that the system wasn't able 
to mount the root fs. The mount command should show the partitions used 
for /. If it isn't /dev/sda1 (or whatever your / partitions name is), 
then you aren't looking at your disk. I would try to mount the / 
partition and see if there is an error and what is is.

> Next thing /home and /var (which I have on seperate partitions) were
> mounted according to "mount", diving into the dirs however they were
> empty.

Same as above, probably no partition mounted but you see the directory 
structure of the initrd.

> Checked blkid and compared to menu.lst (wasn't 9.10 supposed to
> upgrade to grub2beta? No trace of grub.cfg there), all fine,
> /proc/cmdline fine, but couldn't boot.

If you can see menu.lst, it would of course contradict what I wrote 
above and your / partition may be mounted after all. Or do you also have 
a separate /boot partition? Anyway, during an upgrade the old grub 
should not be replaced by grub2 - that one is only used for a fresh 
install.

> "runlevel" reports: unknown (scary, huh?)

The runlevel concept is from sysvinit and upstart doesn't have it. From 
"man runlevel":

| NOTES
|  This tool is provided for compatibility with the traditional System V
|  init(8). Upstart has no notion of runlevels itself, this and the
|  telinit(8) tool are provided to emulate their behaviour.

I don't think the runlevel command will give you any useful information 
on a 9.10 system.

Anyway, I have no idea what went wrong. But can you tell us how you did 
the upgrade from 8.04 to 9.10? The way you did it might be important to 
raise some ideas.


Nils