[gentoo-user] Cannot boot multipartitioned installation

["Michael Kintzios" <michaelkintzios@lycos.co.uk>]

Hi All,

I just fitted a new ATA drive (hdb) in my box and thought of doing the
best thing for it - install Gentoo 2004.3 :-)

I used the following partitioning scheme which spreads across both hda &
hdb.  Boot is ext2, the rest are reiserfs - straight forward stuff.
Once I chroot into it I get:

  # df -h 
  Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on 
  /dev/hdb7             393M   43M  350M  11% / 
  none                  393M   43M  350M  11% /sys 
  none                  393M   43M  350M  11% /dev 
  none                  393M   43M  350M  11% /dev/pts 
  /dev/hdb1              46M  4.4M   39M  11% /boot 
  /dev/hdb2             102M   33M   70M  32% /tmp 
  /dev/hdb3             3.9G   50M  3.8G   2% /var 
  /dev/hdb5             6.6G  861M  5.7G  13% /usr 
  /dev/hdb6             1.6G   33M  1.6G   2% /home 
  /dev/hda7             3.1G  421M  2.7G  14% /var/tmp 
  /dev/hda8             306M   36M  270M  12% /lib 
  none                  393M   43M  350M  11% /dev/shm

After I installed a stage three 2004.3 profile I compiled a kernel
(2.6.9-r9 from gentoo-dev sources) and tried to boot into my new system.
Grub launches and mounts hdb7.  Then it fails with the following kernel
panic error:

  ReiserFS: hdb7: Using r5 hash to sort names 
  VFS: Mounted root (reiserfs filesystem) readonly. 
  Freeing unused kernel memory: 212k freed. 
  Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. 
  Try passing init= option to kernel.

This is my fstab:

  /dev/hdb1               /boot           ext2            noauto,noatime
1 1 
  /dev/hdb7               /               reiserfs        noatime
0 0 
  /dev/hda6               none            swap            sw
0 0 

  /dev/hdb2               /tmp            reiserfs        noatime
0 0 
  /dev/hdb3               /var            reiserfs        noatime
0 0 
  /dev/hdb5               /usr            reiserfs        noatime
0 0 
  /dev/hdb6               /home           reiserfs        noatime
0 0 

  /dev/hda7               /var/tmp        reiserfs        noatime
0 0 
  /dev/hda8               /lib            reiserfs        noatime
0 0 

  /dev/cdroms/cdrom0      /mnt/cdrom      iso9660         noauto,ro
0 0 
  /dev/fd0                /mnt/floppy     auto            noauto
0 0 

  # NOTE: The next line is critical for boot! 
  none                    /proc           proc            defaults
0 0 

  none                    /dev/shm        tmpfs           defaults
0 0 

I cannot for the life of me understand what's wrong.  Why isn't
/sbin/init loaded into memory?  I've checked /etc/inittab and there's
nothing wrong with it.

This is my grub.conf:

  title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.9-gentoo-r9 
  root (hd1,0) 
  kernel /kernel-2.6.9-gentoo-r9 root=/dev/hdb7

I've sought help here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=262302
but none of the suggestions helped me to solve it.  I don't know what
else to try.  Could it be my partitioning scheme, paths or access
rights?  I've tried different configurations of 2.6.9-r9 (just in case)
but the same error occurs.

Any ideas?  How can I troubleshoot it?  What "init= option" is it asking
for?
-- 
Regards,
Mick


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