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

[Tom H]

>> > > Just a small 'me too'.
>> > > After the update to Karmic *or* fresh installations, a lot of servers
>> > > no longer find their boot drives. Sometimes it works, sometimes it
>> > > doesn't. Is there already a bug number for this?
>> >
>> > Yeah, it's called "Canonical finally struck out with boldness and have to
>> >  sort out the mess that rushing releases causes". Don't have the number
>> >  handy, sorry.
>>
>> I couldn't find one either. Weird, because I'm seeing this on every single
>> installation of Karmic.
>> There is a small related thread on Ubuntu forums.
>> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1319976
>>
>> I filed a bug. Please comment on this bug and confirm if you have the same
>> problems:
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lvm2/+bug/460914
>> I consider this very critical, but so far there have been no responses on
>> Launchpad.
>>
>
> I filed a bug about a problem with grub.  (or at least the setup of grub.cfrg.
>
> I rebuilt a server yesterday and ran into it again.   A fresh (or probably not
> fresh) install will leave any old boots (like 9.04) unbootable because:
>
> 1) The uuid for the boot partition and the root partition are made the same.
> Each should point to its respective partition.
>
> 2) On a 9.04 entry (for example)  the kernel and initrd entires will have
> /boot/  at the start of the path.  This should not be there.
>
> 3) The  set root=(HDx,y)  entry will be wrong.
>
> Fixing the above will allow booting.
>
> This has been fixed in the latest grub updates I believe. At least it is now
> corrected on what I installed yesterday.

I don't think that it was a Grub problem since Dexter checked the
UUIDs, unless replacing the UUIDs with /dev/sdX.

But you are right, Grub had issues with root and boot and UUIDs in the
alpha releases (even at one point mis-writing grub.cfg with "set
boot=" rather than "set root=" if I remember correctly). AFAIK, there
still is a problem with /boot being on its own, separate partition,
but Dexter's setup is different:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/442631

Grub 2 also has problems when /boot is on a dmraid but Grub 1 also had
problems with it so... The only suggestion that I have seen to solve
this problem (when it is encountered, who knows how many people are
running without a hitch on dmraid...) is to create a miniature
partition with boot and bios_grub flags.

I followed the links that you posted and the links that they had and
there were various solutions involving adding one or more of the
following rootdelay=90 all_generic_ide pci=nomsi acpi=off irqpoll to
the kernel/linux line of menu.lst/grub.cfg, re-creating initrd,
re-installing linux-image, and even re-installing... Of the Grub
options, some worked for some people and did not work for others...

We once came across a box at worked that was dumping us into Busybox
and we had to re-create initrd after adding a device module into
/etc/initramfs-tools/modules for it to boot properly but / was not
mounted as in Dexter's case.