HUGE Mistake in Ubuntu Feisty Fawn HERD 5

March 22, 2007

Wow. Just wow. After being frustrated for hours, I found this post on why Ubuntu Feisty Fawn HERD 5 was completely ignoring that I had any hard drives during initramfs. I kept getting to the USB HID part (which happens after the ‘Waiting for root filesystem…’ message) and hard locking for about 5 minutes before dropping to the initramfs shell. Here’s how to fix this absolutely stupid and negligent problem:

  1. Get your LiveCD and go into rescue mode (I used the alternate install CD, so YMMV with the normal one).
  2. Answer all the questions until it drops you to a shell. This shell sucks, so hit ALT-F2 to get to a real terminal. Hit ENTER and you’re there.
  3. Type chroot target/ and you’ll be in your root partition. Now, type bash. Congratulations! A useable terminal.
  4. Edit with your editor of choice the file /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and jam in all this crap:

libata
pata_jmicron
ata_piix
ahci
ata_generic
  1. Now, mount up your /boot partition if you have it separate from your root. If it’s on your root partition (ls /boot should let you know), then skip this step. I used mount /dev/sda5 /boot.
  2. type update-initramfs -u -k 2.6.20-12-generic, replacing the last bit with your actual kernel version. It will regenerate your initramfs file for the given kernel, which now will contain the modules listed in the file you just edited. Do this for all desired kernels.
  3. Reboot into grub, and select one of the kernels you changed. Try to boot it with its default kernel line. I used a line with a UUID and it worked fine. YMMV on this too. If it still breaks, try giving it a kernel line with root=/dev/sda5 or whatever partition your boot is on.

I’m really glad this worked, and it better be fixed in Feisty REALLY soon. Otherwise, I’m going to lose a lot of faith in Ubuntu. Also, why doesn’t the graphical installer support RAID partitioning? Lame.



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Comments

  1. Michael

    March 22, 2007 at 9:20 AM

    Hi,

    Someone came to me today for ubuntu support asking if they should upgrade to Feisty, They quoted this page as a reason why they were confused as to if they should or not.

    Many users do not realise Head 5 was a development / testing / unstable release of Ubuntu Feisty.

    Now that feisty has been released (and this isn’t an issue) could you make it clear on your post.

    Thanks


  2. bish0p

    March 22, 2007 at 9:20 AM

    yeah, this is most definitely an issue with the final version of Feisty.

    The damn thing created a useless (didn’t load the modules) initramfs. If i wasn’t in such severe hatred mode on Ubuntu (and we had been getting along so well) I’d provide a run down of what was attempted the last 6 hours.. but instead i’m installing CentOS and not looking back.


  3. Bjørn Olai Bye

    March 22, 2007 at 9:20 AM

    Thank you!! The we is flooded with people who seem to have this exact problem. Was nearly impossible to filter through the spam. Stumbled on your page by chance. This seems like a way to easy fix to not have been done by Ubuntu in official kernel updates. Well well. I’m happy. Maybe you should try moving this to ubuntuforums?


  4. Hank

    March 22, 2007 at 9:20 AM

    Thanks for the comment. I would agree with you except my friend tried to install Feisty today and was turned away.


    17:21:44 < hardwarehank> what version of feisty did that problem happen on?
    17:21:51 < py1hon> final
    17:22:28 < py1hon> it was having lots of issues
    17:22:33 < hardwarehank> it cant find the hds on boot?
    17:23:11 < py1hon> that was part of it
    17:24:25 < py1hon> I think the main problem was the same problem you had, not
    loading the right modules
    17:24:46 < hardwarehank> ok
    17:24:47 < hardwarehank> thanks

    Once I hear reports that people with the JMicron SATA controller can install Feisty with no problems whatsoever, I’ll note in the post that this has been resolved.