upgrading kernel in VMware Virtual machine of dapper kills the VM

[matt nicholson]

On Dec 7, 2005, at 1:31 PM, Steve wrote:

> matt nicholson wrote:
>> Not sure which mailing list to post this to so going to both users 
>> and devel.
>> I have dapper running in a VM on VMware 5.5, breezy as a host. All of 
>> the recent Dapper upgrades have gone quite nice thus far, with one 
>> exception. When performing the upgrade of linux-image-386(2.6.12.16 
>> to 2.6.15.4) and linux-restricted-modules-386(2.6.12.16 to 2.6.15.4), 
>> the VM dies. By this i mean that, upon reboot, Grub comes up, the 
>> system starts to boot (the new "handdrawn" usplash comes up), and it 
>> gets as far a "Mounting the root file system" After a few seconds 
>> here, I get dropped to a console saying:
>>  Alert! /dev/sda1/ does not exist. Dropping you to a shell!
>> however, i do not get dropped to a shell and the VM just sits there, 
>> dead.
>> Luckily I make snap shots for just this purpose and can get back to 
>> right before the upgrade in seconds. I have confirmed that its only 
>> these 2 packages that cause this.
>> Not being a kernel "expert", or even a "the way ubuntu boots" expert, 
>> I am sort of stuck. Its obvious to me either the VM SCSI device is 
>> not being detected, or, if it is, its not being used at all. With not 
>> shell do goto i cannot diagnose the problem further.
>> Since dapper is a developemt work, and I'm running this in a VM, this 
>> is no big deal for me. I can just ignore that update for a while. I 
>> was jsut wondering if anyone else had the same problem/a fix/an 
>> answer.
>> Thanks and keep up the great work.
>> Matt Nicholson
>
> Hi Matt,
>
> On initial boot of your dapper vm, does the grub menu show the 
> previous installed kernel? You should be able to select that and boot.
>
Nope, cause its upgrades the kernel in place, not a "new version" of 
it, so it just auto-selects the only entry.

> Sounds like it might be something to do with the booting procedure not 
> recognizing the filesystem *type* that is on the virtual sda 
> partition. Maybe editing the grub menu to specifically state the 
> filesystem type might do the trick (provided you can actually boot 
> into the system using the old kernel).
>
actually, i managed to get to a shell once a day or so ago and, if i 
remember correctly, /dev/sda (the entire disk) didn't exits, let alone 
/dev/sda1 (the partition/filesystem), so i don't think its a filesystem 
problem, but more of a hardware (even thought its soft-vm-hardware) 
problem.

> Then again I could be wrong... :-)
>
> Thanks for the warning though... I too run VMware 5.5 and was thinking 
> of installing dapper as a VM. Now I know what to look out for.
>
no problem and thanks for the suggestions.

> -Steve.
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