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

[Tom H]

>> >>> 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
>> >
>> > Yes, the mounted / was the real deal as I could access my custom files
>> > and as you stated below menu.lst and everything else. mount was sda6
>> > which is supposed to be my / disk. No seperate /boot partition in here.


>> Do you see all your partitions when you run "ls /dev//dev/sda*" after
>> "Dropping to a shell"?

I was not asking about your mountpoints or mounted partitions. I was
asking about the actual content of the /dev directory.


>> Poking around my initrd, it looks like your "ALERT! ... Dropping to a
>> shell!" message comes from the initrd script that mounts /. The output
>> between "ALERT" and "Dropping" is what initrd's init script thinks
>> your / is. Is it correct?
> Not reproduceable since I overwrote the broken system with backups.


>> The init script in initrd gets /'s location from the menu.lst kernel.
>> Check that the UUID in "root=UUID=..." is correct or change it to
>> "root=/dev/sd..." (with an "e" at the grub menu) and boot.

> See original post.

I was asking (politely!) for you to re-check the UUIDs.

And to try /dev/sdX just in case /dev/disk/by-uuid was not being seen.