Bug 167

Created attachment 31 [details]
picture of failure

What are the last changes you did to the system before booting ?
It appears to be an initrd or grub error.
So what changes did you do to partitions, grub menu, etc ?

CC: (none) => andr55

Please send a copy of /etc/fstab, /boot/grub/menu.lst

Keywords: (none) => NEEDINFO

Created attachment 55 [details]
1 fstab

Created attachment 56 [details]
2 fstab

Created attachment 57 [details]
3 fstab

Created attachment 58 [details]
menu.lst

(In reply to comment #2)
i don't remember doing changes, i don't use it much, it's on an old HDD

The fstab coincides with the first 3 boot options of menu.lst.

However the default is the 4th boot option.
It specifies booting from the first partition of the second hard disk.  Which is not in fstab.
It also specifies using /boot/grub/menu.lst from that same partition, by default since the partition isn't specified.

This 4th option has the title "Mandriva Linux (Official)", and not Mageia.
So this raises some questions.

You are trying to boot to which partition (on which disk) ?

If you are trying to boot from the first partition of the second disk, we need to see the fstab and menu.lst from that partition.

If you are trying to boot from the first partition of the first disk, did you select one of the first 3 boot options ?

To boot by default to the first disk, the 4th line of menu.lst should be changed from "default 3" to "default 0"

during mageia installation i have chosen mandriva to be default, as it is stable

when booting mageia, i always selected manually the mageia option

you are saying that if i change from "default 3" to "default 0" i should see a difference?

no.  Just confirming.
You did exactly what you should have done, and "default 3" is appropriate.

Does the default boot to Mandriva still work ?

If so, could you confirm from Mandriva that the Mageia root partition (/) is accessible ?  It is specified as the first partition of the first hard disk (sda1).

try :
$ mkdir /mnt/mga/
$ mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/mga/
$ ls /mnt/mga/boot

in the list you should see :
initrd-2.6.37-desktop-3mga.img
vmlinuz-2.6.37-desktop-3mga

(the first being the boot image, the second the kernel)
Please confirm

i just noticed that booting from sda1 to mdv doesn't work, and it the menu mandriva is no more, instead i can see mageia witch doesn't work

the default 3 is supposed to show me the menu.lst from sdb1/boot? it doesn't, as i said above, i can see 'mageia' everywhere 'mandriva' is written when booting from sdb1

booting from sdb1 mdv works and i can access all of sda, and the files in sda1/boot are there

at first i said i must have bads on sda, but no such problem...

Good.
This means that there is a problem with the internal content of the initrd image.

(Despite the fact that your kernel panic screen says that initrd is "not tainted".
The same symptom can occur on Mandriva, the "not tainted" message must refer to the file format, or checksum.)

1) could you post the output of 
# lsinstrd initrd-2.6.37-desktop-3mga.img
(from console with root privileges, against the image in sda1 boot/ )

2) How did you install Mageia ? (options entered, etc)

We're making progress :)

1)lsinstrd: command not found
2)i dont remember
3)i dont know how, but the kernel panic is gone, i am back to not seeing the logon screen, as stated in bug 125, so i'll answer ahmad now that i have no kernel panic

sorry, that should have been
# lsinitrd initrd-2.6.37-desktop-3mga.img

Created attachment 79 [details]
lsinitrd initrd-2.6.37-desktop-3.mga.img

It failed trying to mount the root filesystem, but if it boots now, the image file parameters + modules must be correct.  (They look ok.)

Maybe timing / hardware problem ?
Or invalid kernel parameters passed at boot time ?

I'll close the bug, but if you have problems again, feel free to reopen.

Keywords: NEEDINFO => (none)
Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => INVALID