Alert! /dev/sdax does not exist. dropping to a shell!

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Re: Alert! /dev/sdax does not exist. dropping to a shell!

Post by 67GTA »

First we need to see what your exact partitions are. Boot the live CD, open a terminal, and post the output of

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sudo fdisk -l
Once we get that info, we can use the live CD to mount your Mint partition, and have a look at some system files to see where the problem is.
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Re: Alert! /dev/sdax does not exist. dropping to a shell!

Post by 67GTA »

From the live CD, open a terminal, and run

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sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
This will mount your Mint root partition. You can access the system files by going to /mnt in the live CD file system. Then post a copy of /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst from /dev/sda2.
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Re: Alert! /dev/sdax does not exist. dropping to a shell!

Post by 67GTA »

Is that all of your fstab file? Can you post all of it, and all of the menu entries in grub?
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Re: Alert! /dev/sdax does not exist. dropping to a shell!

Post by 67GTA »

That all looks normal. Post the output from a terminal for

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sudo blkid
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Re: Alert! /dev/sdax does not exist. dropping to a shell!

Post by 67GTA »

I can't figure out why it can't find your root partition. When the grub menu comes up, hit "e" to edit. Then select the kernel line(second line down) and hit "e" again. Then at the end of the line add this:

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root=UUID=06f2d0ca-4320-482b-88e8-44be0a09991b
Before:

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/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=/dev/sda2 ro quiet splash 
After:

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/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=06f2d0ca-4320-482b-88e8-44be0a09991b ro quiet splash


Then hit "enter" and then "b" to boot. If that works, you can edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to include the UUID intsead of /dev/sda2
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Re: Alert! /dev/sdax does not exist. dropping to a shell!

Post by 67GTA »

It sounds like your having trouble with your sata drive if that command worked. What is in /boot/grub/device.map?
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Re: Alert! /dev/sdax does not exist. dropping to a shell!

Post by 67GTA »

Everything looks fine. It must be something to do with your sata drive, and the drivers being loaded. I saw a similar thread on the Ubuntu forums, and it was completely random. Sometimes it would boot, sometimes it wouldn't no matter what was tried. I'm at a loss. One last thing to look at is /dev/disk/by-uuid and make sure the UUID numbers there match up with what is in fstab.
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Re: Alert! /dev/sdax does not exist. dropping to a shell!

Post by idiotkiwi »

I have been following this discussion as I have a case of UUID incompatibilities which shows up with differences between the results shown by blkid and fstab. The incompatibility is not causing me any problems but which is the correct result.??

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Re: Alert! /dev/sdax does not exist. dropping to a shell!

Post by 67GTA »

The blkid results are the ones to trust. Blkid reads the current UUID of each device. Post a copy of fstab and the output of

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sudo fdisk -l
and

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sudo blkid
.
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