[solved] Arch kernel panic with grub 2 (another instance)

Question

Hey all,
I read through this thread: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=663976 which is somewhat similar to my problem, but not the same.
I successfully installed Arch with a VMware VM, got gnome, openbox, and lxde installed... mucked around a bit. All looked good so I wanted to try it with an actual install.
Background:
I am new to Arch and relatively new to Linux... although not afraid of the terminal.
I am running a Lenovo SL500 laptop.
The laptop has one drive (sda) and is divided as following:
sda1: service partition (required for this machine)
sda2: ntfs containing Windows 7
sda3: extended partition containing:
      sda5: linux swap
      sda6: ntfs data storage
      sda7: ext4 ubuntu 9.10
      sda8: ext4 arch
Here is what I did:
I installed arch to sda8, and when it came time for me to set the boot partition I selected 'none' as I wanted to use grub2 which is already installed via the ubuntu installation.
When the installation of arch finished, I rebooted into my ubuntu system and ran update-grub. The output verified that Arch was located at sda8, and the grub.cfg file shows:
menuentry "Arch (on /dev/sda8)" {
    insmod ext2
    set root=(hd0,8)
    search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 5ee916d1-5051-4e27-9c1f-a74f04693337
    linux /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sda8
When I attempt to boot into arch, as it is above, I get:
    Unable to mount filesystem
    not syncing : VFS : Unable to mount root fs on unknown block (0,0)
Now... when I installed arch I formated the partition to ext4, I have verified that it is ext4, and the fstab in the arch partition lists it as ext4. When I altered the above grub2 boot parameters and changed ext2 to ext4, it returned 'error - file not found'.
Any idea where I went wrong or what I should try to fix this?
Should I have installed a bootloader with the arch install?
Thanks for any help
Last edited by visser (2009-12-09 18:48:27)

Answer 1

My grub2 installation was also via Ubuntu and the auto-detected entry didn't work, so in /etc/grub.d/40_custom (Ubuntu) I have this...
#!/bin/sh
exec tail -n +3 $0
# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the
# menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change
# the 'exec tail' line above.
menuentry "Arch Linux (on /dev/sda5)" {
set root=(hd0,5)
linux /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/80db2d73-6dea-465c-a9a2-b14624badc57 ro
initrd /boot/kernel26.img
menuentry "Arch Linux (fallback)" {
set root=(hd0,5)
linux /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/80db2d73-6dea-465c-a9a2-b14624badc57 ro
initrd /boot/kernel26-fallback.img
menuentry "Windows XP" {
set root=(hd0,1)
chainloader +1
I believe you can disable os_prober by adding
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER="true"
to /etc/default/grub. I disabled it myself by the other method, removing it's executable flag...
sudo chmod -x /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober
I should point out that I haven't installed grub2 in Arch yet as I'm still in the transitional (and undecided) stage.