Upgrade 8.04->9.10 fails: crash to tty, claims can't mount rootfs

[Tom H]

>>> So today I finally decided to upgrade to 9.10 from 8.04.
>>> Now after rebooting the system crashed to a maintenance shell
>>> claiming the system wasn't able to mount the root fs.
>>> Funny thing here: / was mounted. could perfectly dive into the
>>> system, run programs and so on. Perfectly mounted.

>> Did you check that you really have your disk partitions mounted? The

> Yes, the mounted / was the real deal as I could access my custom files and as
> you stated below menu.lst and everything else. mount was sda6 which is
> supposed to be my / disk. No seperate /boot partition in here.

Do you see all your partitions when you run "ls /dev//dev/sda*" after
"Dropping to a shell"?

Poking around my initrd, it looks like your "ALERT! ... Dropping to a
shell!" message comes from the initrd script that mounts /. The output
between "ALERT" and "Dropping" is what initrd's init script thinks
your / is. Is it correct?

The init script in initrd gets /'s location from the menu.lst kernel.
Check that the UUID in "root=UUID=..." is correct or change it to
"root=/dev/sd..." (with an "e" at the grub menu) and boot.


> Thanks for the grub(2) and runlevel info btw.

You're welcome.