Failure to mount root partition after major lenny dist-upgrade
I’ve been very busy the last two months working on the US Social Forum. As a result - I’ve neglected liberace, my laptop. I went a full two months without even running apt-get update. Since liberace is running Lenny, the testing version of Debian, when I finally updating and then ran apt-get dist-upgrade, I had over 300 packages to upgrade, including a kernel upgrade.
I should know better, but in the interest of time I simply pulled them all in together.
When I rebooted, I got an error message:
/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
Looking up the screen, I discovered the error message that was causing the problem:
mount: Mounting /dev/hda6 on /root failed: No such device
I was fortunately dropped into an Ash shell, giving me some tools to play with.
I tried:
cat /proc/partitions
And saw all my normal partitions, including /dev/hda6, which is my root partition.
I then tried:
mount /dev/hda6 /root
And I received the message:
mount: Mounting /dev/hda6 on /root failed: Invalid argument
For kicks I tried:
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda6 /root
And presto it worked. I then manually ran:
mount /sys /root/sys
mount /proc /root/proc
Since those two commands failed before I was dropped into the ash shell.
Then, I typed:
exit
And liberace booted up without a hitch.
In an effort to trouble shoot, I re-booted liberace (and got the same results). I also tried using previous kernels - also with the same results (so it doesn’t seem to be related to the kernel upgrade).
At one point, after getting dropped into the Ash shell, I tried:
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda6 /root
umount /root
mount /dev/hda6 /root
And that worked.
Ash doesn’t have fsck, so I re-booted into Recovery Is Possible and ran fsck on /dev/hda6. No problems.
So… I can boot if I run those manually commands. However, I have no idea why the kernel can’t mount the root partition.