unable to boot from lfs 6.2 after kernel compilation
 

dear list,

- i have successfully compiled all the modules as mentioned in lfs 6.2 book.
- the kernel is successfully compiled with few warnings.
- i have the following partitions

hda1 - fc3 host
hda2 - swap
hda4 - extended
hd5 - lfs
hd6 - /usr (lfs target /usr)

- i have modified the fedora grub.conf as following

root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz(fedora 3)
initrd /initrd.img

root (hd0, 4)
kernel /lfskernel-2.6.16.27 root=/dev/hda5

- i have no clue why my lfs would not boot.
in the boot up process the kernel is unable to uncompress the bzImage (which is previously produced by the compilation of source kernel). as mentioned by the lfs book, i have copied this bzImage into the lfs directory /boot.

- after failing to uncompress the bzImage of the target lfs system, my machine reboots and again grub appears. i dont have any error message displayed like kernel panic as it seems I am struck in a too early starge.

please SOS. thanks in anticipation.

-----------
host FC3
vga - S3 chrome
monitor - generic 600 x 800
hdd - 80 gb seagate
512 mb ram

Is it possible that the decompression tools reside in /usr/bin (which would not be available so early in a boot) as opposed to /bin?

unable to boot from lfs 6.2 after kernel compilation
 

dear daws,

many thanks for your help. as suggested i have copied bzunzip from /bin to /usr/bin. still my kernel never seems to uncompress. besides i am not sure about the problem, as its based on my assumption. could there be any other reason besides this.

any pointers. thanks once again.

best regards

Hmm ok.

You say

so try changing the grub menu.lst to reflect this (sometimes using grub notation works better)

so the kernel line would become:

See if that works.

unable to boot from lfs 6.2 after kernel compilation
 

dear daws,

as mentioned in the beginning of this thread i have pointed the full path in my /boot/grub/menu.lst

could there be anything else, i have to check. kindly advise.

best regards

I don't like the whitespace in "(hd0, 4)". Try changing it to "(hd0,4)".

This is true, I didn't notice that. But I think something else is going on. grub seems to find the kernel alright, otherwise it would be a different error, not "unable to decompress".

Oh I found something else. Apparently all kernels are compressed with gzip, bzImage does not mean bzip2 compressed (apparently it gets put into "High memory" or something, went straight over my head anyway). So make sure all gzip related tools are in /bin not /usr/bin.

Apart from that I don't know what is going on.

unable to boot from lfs 6.2 after kernel compilation
 

To

Vitalie Ciubotaru - For your kind attention to this thread
Daws - For your patience and continous attention

Together sorry for this long message

Why we want LFS
---------------
- We need our own custom kernel without distribution specific images, logo and availablity of OS commands
- We have a specific slow but new hardware for mass production
- the hardware is 8" chinese b/w monitor, SChrome VIA Vga Card, VIA PC 1500 barebone

problem in reproducing the code
-------------------------------
my fc3 vga is a little bit shaky making the system hang if too many scrolling is done (in firefox, etc and whatever), making me impossible to cut and paste my menu.lst or grub.conf. what i have tried to do is reproduce the code here. forgive me if they are not exact. (dear vitalie, in my menu.lst there is no white space, its only in my mail. sorry for the not typing exactly as it appeared.)

what we did differently other than what is mentioned in lfs book
---------------------------------------------------------------
- i have two seperate partitions one for / for target lfs in hda5 and another for /usr in hda6. hd5 and hd6 resides in extended partition hd4. hd1 for fc3 and hd2 for swap. hd3 is not represented by any partition.

anything looked strange ?
-------------------------
- except kernel compilation which had few warnings there was no other noticable error or warning for cause of concern during the entire lfs unpack, configure and make process.

- kernel was recompiled after removing the source/linux-2.6.16.27 directory completely after unsuccessful booting and rebooting of lfs

output during boot process (not exact representation)
-----------------------------------------------------

then my machine reboots and grub appears again. hope i have not confused you. thanks for your time.

best regards

Dear Daws,

In a hurry to finish the message, i have forgotten to mention that I have done as what you have said.

My gzip resides only in /bin so i did not do this step.

same here

for all the first 3 commands i received
gzip exists
gzip exists
gzip exists

the last one successfully created gunzip link.

Sorry for my impatience once again.

I have seen things like this before, on my own system more often than not.

I understand what you mean now, where the system hangs at

Uncompressing kernel ...

The problem may lie in the configuration of the kernel. It is possible that you have forgotten to compile in support for something key in the system. Maybe the filesystem (which should not be a module), or support for the chipset, or you have enabled some experimental code (what I did) by accident... The list goes on. I'm afraid you have to go through the configuration again, recompile and hopefully, after some trial and error, you will find what went wrong.

Sorry I couldn't be more specific. Hope it works out...

mate. though its not a good thing, this is the only hope for me now :-)

I understand what you mean now, where the system hangs at

i am expecting this but this text never appears.

Actually I have selected all the option during the previous compilation. Now I have select only certain things that I feel is absolutely necessary. yet no success. I guess i need to make another try and another and another ... :-(. Also I am thinking of making a diff between the .config of LFS and the .config of my FC3 host to see what goes wrong in my compilation.

i have noted some warnings in my compilation and again this is not an exact representation of the output.

fs/bio.c - in function bio_alloc_bioset
warning idx may be used uninitialized in this function

fs/eventpoll.c - in function .............
fs/isofs/namei.c
fs/nfsd/nfsctl.c
fs/udf/balloc.c
fs/udf/super.c
ipc/msg.c
ip/sem.c

sound/core/oss/route.c
i368/math-enu/fpu_entry.c

i have an interesting output when i compiled bzimage and module seperately. the output is

I hope i can give some more clue.

No problems mate, in fact you are my only hope now in the entire community. I wonder why there is no body to reply in the lfs-support@linuxfromscratch.org. may be its due to my poor english.

Reverting ... after a diff of .config

Best Regards

Post verbatim (and in [[code] tags) your grub.lst, output of 'ls -l /boot' on hda5, output of 'fdisk -l /dev/hda', and your kernel configuration.

Dear Daws + List,

I have recompiled and reduced my warnings during compile to a bare minimum. I have read in the redhat manual that certain older bios will not support booting of linux if the hdd cylider is above 1024. So i have backed up the lfs to a new hdd (hdc) in the beginning cylinder. however, i am unable to boot as my grub is not able to find the stage1 located in /boot/grub/

i entered the chroot environment and my grub output is below when i type setup (hd1,0).

i am sure that stage1 exists in that location. now i guess if i my grub detect my stage1, i can see if the cylinder on which my linux resides is a problem or not.

any pointers.

Run
strace -o log grub
, do the same things and post contents of file log.

OK this is getting a bit beyond my ability now, all I could offer is guesses. However I do suggest that you ask a mod nicely to move this thread (maybe rename it too) to a different forum, maybe Linux - Kernel or Linux - General. Both forums receive more traffic than the LFS forum and perhaps regulars there will be able to help.

There is thread around here somewhere about this, lfs-support do not normally ignore requests for help, it may be due to their strict spam filters. I do not believe they ignored your message due to poor english.

PS. raskin seems to know what he is talking about so it would be in your best interests to follow his advice and post the infomation he and others request if you can.

Good Luck. I hope you get it sorted.

Not that I really know that much about many possible situations (only about few I had myself or helped to sort out) or about internals, but I pretend to know where to look to get lots of info. Mystical not found files are strace's job, not human brain's one. And yes, I know what people with solved difficult problems end up posting, so I propose to post it earlier rather than later (though 16 messages is already not so early to do it).

Dear Sweet Daws + Raskin,

My RHCE man who was doing this for me for quite a while got frustrated and gone for a vacation. This is stalled for some time. I will post the outcome after trying what you (Raskin) have suggested. I cant ask for more than your guesses. I am thankful for your time.

We will post our queries again to LFS and other forums. Either way will inform you all about the outcome at the end of this chain.

best personal regards

lfs partition grub>root(hd0,4)--->says file system unknown partition type 0xb
 

Respected lfs-6.2 experience members
please help me as I am in final stage of lfs-6.2
I have followed the lfs-6.2 book by all means and installed all the modules of lfs-6.2
Now at grub prompt
when I issue
grub>root (hd0,4) that is hda5 my lfs partition it says
filesystem unknown partition type 0xb
I have Redhat 9(2.6.8) as host system on hda7
And swap on hda8
And windows on hda1
please help me why my lfs partition filesystem is unknown wy not it is ext3
I am a newbe and have no idea what to do and how to tackle this problem
zalmay

unable to boot from lfs 6.2 after kernel compilation
 

Dear Daws + Raskin,

Good News !

We have finally succeeded the booting into the LFS kernel. I would like to attribute this success to partimage. partimage helped us to save our work before doing crucial things or things that may go wrong. we have taken an image

1. before booting into the kernel
2. after booting into the kernel
3. after xfree86
4. after xfce
5. after gdm + xfce

our host was fc3.

alternatively, we have were trying to build LFS at home, which had a fc4 as host system. we have taken two images

1. after xfree86
2. after lfs kernel boot

we copied the xfree86 image into the new host system at office but it never worked as expected. hence we took the second image (after lfs kernel boot) and started whole blfs process again.

we succeeded !

Bad News
---------
We were unable to find why we were not able to boot from the lfs kernel. till date the pc which we used as a host could not boot the lfs. we even attached a working lfs hard disk from a different hardware of the same configuration.

sorry for abling to give solution the problem for which we initially started this thread.

ps: thanks for your guys, specially daws and raskin for all the help. we have seen the god (godess and she is beautiful).

regards

I'm glad to hear you got it working and thank you for following up. Far too many members do not do so.

Best wishes for the future.

Dear pannet1

You succeded with the grub problem but how you did it it is not mentioned on the forum. will you please share yoour experience with me cause I am having the same problem of booting from my lfs-6.2
I have installed my lfs-6.2 with Redhat Linux(2.6.8) as host system and lfs partition is hda5.
When I apply the command from the grub menue as
grub> root (hd0,4)
it give me error as
the specified disk does not exist
I don't know what to do
I will be glade if you may help me by sharing your experience of grub with me
thanks

Dear Daws + Raskin
please help me as I am in final stage of lfs-6.2
I have followed the lfs-6.2 book by all means and installed all the modules of lfs-6.2
Now at grub prompt
when I issue
grub>root (hd0,4) that is hda5 my lfs partition it says
filesystem unknown partition type 0xb
I have Redhat 9(2.6.8) as host system on hda7
And swap on hda8
And windows on hda1
please help me why my lfs partition filesystem is unknown wy not it is ext3
I am a newbe and have no idea what to do and how to tackle this problem
zalmay

zalmaygul, I think your question would be better suited in its own thread.

Anyway,

I am not sure but I think 0xb is a partition type used by Windows (FAT32 maybe?).

Could you post the infomation provided by "cfdisk /dev/hda" (don't change anything yet)

I think that the partition type needs to be changed to 0x83, and you can certainly do that in cfdisk, but I don't know whether doing that will screw up the existing filesystem.

filesystem unknown partition type 0xb
 

Dear Daws
thank you for being there for my help
When a newbe trape in a problem and helpless to proceed he some time perform this kind of mistake by jumping into wrong thread
Sorry for being in a wrong thread.

I have redhat 9 when I apply cfdisk /dev/hda it says command not found
Then I used fdisk command and its contents are given bellow

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 30.0 GB, 30020272128 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3649 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 893 7172991 b Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda2 894 3649 22137570 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5 1787 2679 7172991 b Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda6 2680 3649 7791493+ b Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda7 894 1709 6554457 83 Linux
/dev/hda8 1710 1774 522081 82 Linux swap

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Please help wheather I can make the change to partition type with fdisk command or not
thank you very much for your continuous help
zalmay

cfdisk is in the util-linux package if you want to use it. fdisk can change the partition type for you. Once you have started "fdisk /dev/hda" you want the t option, and hex code 83. But as I said before, I don't know what this will do to the existing ext3 filesystem, it might destroy it.

Dear Daws
thank you very much for your help
Your specified method helped me and I did changed the partition type accordingly and it worked without any damage
I am so really thankfull to you for your help And I guess without it I would'n't have proceeded.
I booted from my new LFS-6.2 with grub and it add alot to my happiness.
Dear friend one more question that I want to ask you where we can find the technical flow of various packages of LFS-6.2 such as Binutils, gcc, glibc etc
I want to learn obout there internals and get to know these from programmar persfective.
thanks
Zalmay :newbie: