Jerry Geis wrote:

...

/ I installed centos 4.6 on a USB thumbdrive.

/>/ It installed and booted after install. />/ />/ I then put a custom kernel on, build it as I should, />/ on rebooting and selecting my kernel to load from grub I it starts up />/ and all />/ and the last error I get is: />/ />/ label / not found. />/ />/ What went wrong? / I'd guess your boot line has something like "root=LABEL=/" and you dont have a filesystem which is marked as label = /

To start, you could either label a filesystem as '/' or, you can just change that root= line to point at a real filesystem.

Also, I can see you are still doing your old "ask on the list rather than actually work out what the problem is" trick :/

Karanbir,

Running e2label /dev/sda1 reports that in fact the partition is "/"

My kernel boot line is infact "root=LABEL=/"

My issue here is that I did the initial install. This install boots with the LABEL=/ just fine. After the custom kernel build it does not boot. I'm trying to find out if there is an option in the config that is needed for these label boots. Perhaps one of these: (I dont know if I am fishing here and/or which one would do it)

CONFIG_NETLABEL CONFIG_BSD_DISKLABEL CONFIG_UNIXWARE_DISKLABEL

I did search and wasn't finding what I was looking for, then I posted.

I have not changed the line to try root=/dev/sda1 as I was trying to make it work the same way.

Thanks for helping.

Jerry

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 06:43:53PM +0100, Karanbir Singh wrote:

Jerry Geis wrote:

...

I have not changed the line to try root=/dev/sda1 as I was trying to make it work the same way.

That might be worth trying, its a simple hack and it will tell you if your kernel even boots or not.

Also, what would happen if there were two filesystems labeled as / ? eg /dev/hda1 and /dev/sda1 ? It might make sense to label the USB thumbdrive as USBroot and modify fstab and grub informtation accordingly.

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 10:21 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:

:

Also, I can see you are still doing your old "ask on the list rather than actually work out what the problem is" trick :/

Oh, cool (for me), someone took over for me....

mhr <BFG>

John R Pierce wrote:

...

To start, you could either label a filesystem as '/' or, you can just change that root= line to point at a real filesystem.

what WOULD be the 'real device' in the case of a USB thumbdrive? since its the boot device, would it necessarily be enumerated first, hence always /dev/sda ? or would it be after any other /dev/sd? that happen to be present on the system, which would mean that its device name is quite unpredictable?

OTOH, using LABEL=/ could be very problematic if there are any OTHER devices present with a filesystem that has LABEL=/ ... I'd wonder if you wouldn't want to use LABEL=USBROOT or some such (and label the USB stick accordingly).

based on the other emails from Jerry recently, I'd assume that the usb drive is the only mass storage device he has in the machine, so /dev/sda should be predictable. But then, isnt this the exact issue that Labels' are supposed to resolve ?

Your recommendations of labeling the partition with something that is specific to the device ( label=USBROOT or label=USBKEYOSROOT ) might be a good 'middle path' here. Might need to do something similar for the swap and then sanity check /etc/fstab