Re: Not staying installed correctly... (kinda long) -possibly solved

On Sunday, March 11, 2012 03:39 zux wrote:

> On 03/11/2012 09:29 AM, Insomniac wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> >    Got a DVD of 13.37 Friday (Thanks, Rich!!) about noon and proceeded to
> >    install it on my
> > 
> > second hdd until about 11PM that night (minus maybe two hours in between
> > for lunch and whatever).
> > 
> >    Here's basically what happens every time I install:
> > First off, I startx works for about 10 seconds, whether root or user then
> > drops back to the console (or whatever it's called). This happens
> > whether I install the whole works or do an install where I can pick all
> > the packages I want and don't want.
> > 
> > If I want 'startx' to work (I always install kde to use btw), after I do
> > the first reboot after the installation, I install the nvidia .sh that I
> > have in my opensuse hdd (I was able to boot back into my opensuse hdd
> > and open a dolphin file manager in root mode and copied a slew of stuff
> > over to the /home partition of the Slackware hdd). Once that's
> > installed, I can then switch to user and 'startx' and I'm in kde.
> > 
> > Everything works fine, no hiccups, burps, nothing going wrong until I
> > need to go back to my opensuse for whatever reason and then as soon as I
> > try to copy something from the opensuse hdd to the /home of the
> > Slackware hdd, it can't do it. Dolphin shows a small message at the
> > bottom about 'mount: mount point swap does not exist' on the Slackware
> > hdd.
> > 
> > Sooo...I log out of opensuse and boot into Slackware hdd to see what's
> > going on and I get a kernel panic. It's this last part that happens,
> > every, single time I log out of Slackware and then try to log back in.:
> > 
> > <skip a whole bunch of bootup stuff>
> > kernel panic - not syncing: no init found. Try passing init= option to
> > kernel
> > 
> > And then maybe three or four lines after that just some gobbledy-gook and
> > it freezes up hard.
> > 
> > I've tried using 'hugesmp.s root=/dev/sda2 rdinit= ro' but it does
> > nothing at all. I end up re-doing the 'setup', formatting / and leaving
> > /home unformatted and installing everything again.
> > 
> > So, why is my 'swap' going missing? Why is my 'init' going missing?
> > Anyone have any idea at all what's happening and why? (I'll do another
> > install (this makes 18 hours total now at this, heh) after/if anyone has
> > any ideas and wants to see any particular files or anything and make
> > copies and put them in my /home partition where I can still see
> > everything there from the opensuse hdd).
> > 
> >    Thanks for any help with this,
> >    
> >    John
> > 
> > PS,
> > 
> >    I've been reading and reading and scouring the forums and internet all
> >    day between the
> > 
> > installs and finding nothing that fits this particular problem.
> 
> i would consider checking the hdd or cables, there is a big chance that
> something is broken.
> 
> if you could boot and did nothing to the hdd and it can't boot now, then
> there is probably something wrong with the hdd.
> 
> what boot manager are you using? if it's suse's, might it be that it's
> looking for init on the wrong hdd?
> other reasons for init to get lost is if the controller module is
> missing or filesystem
> 

  I think you might have hit on a part of it. Literally just a few minutes before going to 
bed this morning, I did one more search with a few different terms and think I found the 
problem...that being, that worried I'd screw up somehow the installation and not be able 
to boot again into my opensuse, I was unplugging the opensuse hdd from the MOBO and 
switching the boot sequence in the BIOS so that the secondary hdd was the only hdd to boot 
after the CDROM. Apparently this messes things up somewhere, somehow.

  Looks like I'm going to have to make sure my backup of my main hdd is as up-to-date as I 
need and try the installation with both hdd's plugged in and hope I can make YaST get the 
boot sequence thing right (at least until I'm able to work a while with Slackware and see 
if I end up liking it better, and then who knows what may happen, heh heh).

  Thanks for the advice though, zux. Much appreciated.


-- 
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.  -Edmund Burke