To boot, during startup I press the blue Thinkvantage button and choose an alternate boot device (the drive in the media bay). This way I can completely remove the Linux drive if needed and it leaves my Windows XP install completely untouched for the non-Linux people in my office to work on.
In Mint 5, this all worked great. In Mint 6, I have the following perplexing behavior:
1. If I boot with the Windows XP drive removed and the Mint 6 drive in the media bay, Mint boots just fine
2. If I boot with the Mint 6 hard drive in the internal location, Mint boots just fine
3. If I boot with the Windows XP drive in it's internal location (where it should be normally), and boot using the media bay drive instead (Mint 6), I get this nasty error:
kinit: No resume image, doing normal boot
mount: mounting /root/dev on /dev/.static/dev failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: No such file or directory
Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init
No init found. Try passing init= bootarg.
... then it drops me into BusyBox.
I have tried reinstalling udev at the suggestion of other postings on the 'net with no success. It reinstalls but the problem persists, but only if I leave the Windows hard drive in the internal drive bay. All I have to do to get Mint to boot out of the media bay is to remove that Windows hard drive.
Is there a fstab parameter that needs modification or something? I can work by removing the Windows hard drive temporarily every time I need to run Linux, but that's a pain. The most frustrating part is that it used to work. I'd install with all the drives in place using an external CD drive, but that axes my Windows MBR and won't ever boot without that Linux hard drive in the media bay. Not practical for the times I'd like to run Windows with the DVD drive in the media bay.
Any suggestions would be welcome and greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.
-Kenton W.
SOLVED
I found the way to solve this problem:
When running Mint, at the command prompt, type
Code: Select all
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/
Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file so that the UUID is specified rather than a device name, which apparently is incorrect in my somewhat unconventional setup. It should look similar to this:
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kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=2786b51c-0f80-4201-8303-88f66218ec1f ro quiet splash
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kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=/dev/sda1 ro quiet splash