Bug 728634

Summary:	USB drive not loaded on boot (necessary for upgrade from RC1->RC2)
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 12.1	Reporter:	Bryan Webb <howard.bryan.webb>
Component:	Basesystem	Assignee:	Steffen Winterfeldt <snwint>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Major
Priority:	P5 - None
Version:	RC 1
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	x86
OS:	openSUSE 12.1
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---
Attachments:	/var/log/messages of boot, showing systemd/dbus msgs and USB disk not mounting

Description Bryan Webb 2011-11-07 11:18:39 UTC

Created attachment 460678 [details]
/var/log/messages of boot, showing systemd/dbus msgs and USB disk not mounting

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1

Using 12.1 RC1, I believe I have the same problem as Bug#728542 (USB drives not
loaded when plugged in).

This problem is preventing me from upgrading to RC2!!!!  or anything else :-(

I got a copy of the 12.1 RC2 DVD ISO, and used the RC1 imagewriter (1.9) to copy
the RC2 ISO to my USB stick.

Because of the preference of my BIOS for windows, I cannot directly boot the ISO
image.  Instead, I am forced to boot RC1, then use a modified Grub entry to boot
from the USB stick kernel image (which does the RC2 install).

However, at the time Grub comes up, only the hard disk partitions are seen, not
the USB stick ISO image partition!!  So, I can never leave RC1 to upgrade to RC2
or anything else!  Please help

Since I cannot boot any USB image, I thought that the regular RC1 kernel should
be the same as the ISO kernel in this regard.  So, I supplied a bunch of
systemd.* parameters on the command line that can hopefully guide you (1) to a
fix, and (2) to help me out of this jam.

So I boot the system, log in, and df:
webbb@t4:~> df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs         153842884 19831040 126197028  14% /
devtmpfs         1432796       60   1432736   1% /dev
tmpfs            1439360      272   1439088   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs            1439360      724   1438636   1% /run
/dev/sda5      153842884 19831040 126197028  14% /
tmpfs            1439360        0   1439360   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs            1439360        0   1439360   0% /media
tmpfs            1439360      724   1438636   1% /var/lock
tmpfs            1439360      724   1438636   1% /var/run
/dev/sda1      156264220 48976636 107287584  32% /winxp2
/dev/sdb5       41283648   967348  38219048   3% /114
/dev/sdb1         185427    84641     91212  49% /114/boot
/dev/sdb6       41283648 13244360  25942088  34% /114/usr
/dev/sdb9       10316088   164580   9627476   2% /114/tmp
/dev/sdb8       10317112   805620   8987412   9% /114/var
/dev/sdb7      198032640 40494988 147477776  22% /114/home

/dev/sdc is missing from the list of drives just like it would have been when
booting from the ISO image:

When looking at the attached /var/log/messages (messages.txt) file,
sdc is the disk
4:0:0:0 is how it's known as a hardware resource (I think)
CENTON is the mfgr name
USB port 1-2

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use imagewriter to write RC2 (or any) ISO image to a USB stick
2. Modify grub.lst to boot from USB stick /dev/sdc
3. Boot (hard disk) RC1 to initial grub screen
4. Verify that sdc is NOT known to the system (though it should be)
5. Attempt to boot USB stick entry, but it will never work.


Actual Results:  
When grub list is displayed, /dev/sdc (the USB stick ISO image) is not known to the system, so boot errors occur.


Expected Results:  
Expect to boot into the USB stick ISO, to upgrade to RC2 or whatever.

Comment 1 Bryan Webb 2011-11-07 11:21:23 UTC

I read thru all 700+ reported bugs, and believe this is related to systemd.  Hence, I am marking it as blocking 696902 per the request therein.

Comment 2 Andreas Jaeger 2011-11-07 11:55:06 UTC

I don't believe that this is related to systemd, let's remove it for now. Since you boot from grub, you boot before systemd even starts.

You cannot boot the way you want to do with booting from sdc directly via grub from the main system AFAIK.

How did you get RC1 installed on the system?


Btw. If you want to update from RC1 to RC2, just run "zypper dup", after checking that your repositories are setup correctly. RC1 should have setup e.g.
http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/12.1/repo/oss/ as the OSS 12.1 repo, check it with "zypper sl -d".

Comment 3 Bryan Webb 2011-11-07 12:18:06 UTC

OK, if it's not systemd, then it's not.


"You cannot boot the way you want to do with booting from sdc directly via grub
from the main system AFAIK."

This is what has been working for me...  edit (vi) /boot/grub/menu.lst, and append the following lines at the end:

title USB Stick
    root (hd2)
    kernel /boot/i386/loader/linux
    initrd /boot/i386/loader/initrd

This has been working for me since 11.1, but it needs hd2, a.k.a. /dev/sdc, to be visible/recognized/mounted by the system.  (As I said, the BIOS on this computer is looking for the kernel and initrd in /, not in /boot/i386/loader, so I need to cross-boot.)


I've had a lot of bad luck with CD/DVD burners over the years, such that the images written can't be read.  I would think that DVDs are a thing of the past, and that the focus should be on getting USB sticks to work reliably.


So, where do you think the problem is, if it's not in systemd?

Comment 4 Steffen Winterfeldt 2011-11-07 13:10:38 UTC

I can't really follow you. You don't need /dev/sdc to be able to boot from it.
grub doesn't care about linux devices at all during boot.

So, your menu.lst entry in the last comment works whether or not the usb stick
is recognized in linux. *Provided* the usb stick really is hd2 (that is, 3rd
in the bios disk order).

Comment 5 Steffen Winterfeldt 2014-12-11 10:33:49 UTC

After reading it again, this is an issue of your bios not providing access to the usb stick (hence grub can't see it and the bios doesn't let you boot from it).

This has nothing to do with linux at all. The way out would be to copy the kernel and initrd to you local disk and create a grub entry that boots the kernel and initrd from there.