Re: Booting a reiserfs root partition with a grub floppy

[Volker Augustin]

Hi Adrian,

>> Hello, is there a way to boot a linux system with a ext2fs
>> boot and a reiserfs root partition (suse 7.3 standard
>> configuration) with a grub floppy? I would like to check
>> whether this works before messing up my mbr ...

>Just follow the instructions in the Fine Manual for creating a grub
>floppy and boot using it.

Well, I already did that. More specifically, I followed the FAQ section "How 
to create a GRUB boot floppy with the menu interface". I also edited the 
menu.1st before to (supposedly) match my system. The kernel boots, then I get 
a kernel panic and am told that the root file system cannot be mounted. My 
fdisk -l /dev/hda listing is as follows:

/dev/hda1   *         1       255   2048256    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2           256      3310  24539287+   f  Win95 Erw. (LBA)
/dev/hda5           256       510   2048256    6  FAT16
/dev/hda6           511       891   3060351    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda7           892       893     16033+  83  Linux
/dev/hda8           894       943    401593+  82  Linux Swap
/dev/hda9           944      1335   3148708+  83  Linux
/dev/hda10         1336      1597   2104483+  83  Linux
/dev/hda11         1598      1852   2048256    7  HPFS/NTFS

Linux mount tells me

/dev/hda9 on / type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/hda7 on /boot type ext2 (rw)
/dev/hda10 on /home type ext2 (rw)
[...]

Here is my boot menu entry:

root (hd0,6)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda9 enableapic ide=nodma
initrd /initrd

I already tried this with /dev/hda7 and /dev/hda8 to no avail.

Grub tells me the following about my partitions:

 Possible partitions are:
   Partition num: 0,  Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7
   Partition num: 4,  Filesystem type is fat, partition type 0x6
   Partition num: 5,  Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7
   Partition num: 6,  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
   Partition num: 7,  Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x82
   Partition num: 8,  Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x83
   Partition num: 9,  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
   Partition num: 10,  Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7

Any ideas besides rtfm? :-))

Volker