Bugzilla – Bug 728634
USB drive not loaded on boot (necessary for upgrade from RC1->RC2)
Last modified: 2014-12-11 10:33:49 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.
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.
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".
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?
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).
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.