Upgrading Ubuntu to "Feisty Fawn" makes broken bambi
Posted 30 April 2007, 14:49. (Filed under: Geek by Andrew)
I’ve got an old laptop computer that I use for a home Linux server. It consumes very little energy and makes a good toy for me to play with.
I installed Ubuntu Server on it because Ubuntu is popular, up-to-date and has a huge following, making it easier to get support for any nasty problems. Ubuntu have a policy of releasing a new version every six months, named after an animal, and this April Feisty Fawn was released, superseding Edgy Eft.
In my enthusiasm for patching and updating, I upgraded to this latest release and rebooted the laptop, which promptly broke. That’ll teach me.
There’s not much more to this story apart from the techy details of the problem and the fix. I found many other people with the same problem, and many purported fixes, but only this one worked:
The error on bootup is:
hda: ERROR, PORTS ALREADY IN USE
But all you see (unless you’re quick) is Ubuntu booting into its emergency shell as “(initramfs)”:
bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off"
This fix that worked for me is from Ben Collins, who is a developer on Ubuntu. He said,
The quick workaround for this on an installed system is to add “piix” to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules, and run “sudo update-initramfs -u”
For installing a system, add break-top to the kernel cmdline via the bootgfx menu. Once at a busybox prompt, run “modprobe piix”. Then “exit” the shell. Once the system is installed, the above work around will also be needed.
We are working on an update to fix this.
I fall into the first category, as I managed to get the machine to boot properly once, so I didn’t have to mount stuff and figure out how to use the emergency shell. It’s now purring along happily.
[Updated 02/05/2007] To add: If you’re getting that error on the PS3, then it seems to be a totally different solution.
To boot, at the kboot prompt, type:
/boot/vmlinux initrd=/boot/initrd.img root=/dev/sda1
Once it’s booted, make the change permanent with:
sudo sed -e 's/sdd1/sda1' -i /etc/kboot.conf
* * *
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