Re: Fedora 6 restore snafu

I'm going to take a shot in the dark here. Given that your fsck found
errors, you're having trouble finding /bin/sh (other files?) and that
you most likely have the correct info in grub.conf (though you should
quadruple check that), I'll bet your disk label is corrupted, and you
have overlapping partitions. How big is your boot disk? If it's upon a
RAID volume larger than 1TB you may need to partition with parted. You
may want to give parted a try anyway. It's more feature rich than
fdisk, and can adjust errors, though you should really recopy your data
if you find any.

My 2c

Jon

Paul Mackinney wrote:
> I'm hoping a seasoned Fedora Linux sysadmin has seen this before and
> knows the path. I've Googled extensively & found several reports of the
> same problem, but no solution. I have backed up & restored many Fedora
> systems. I've had to deal with LVM UUID differences, reinstalling grub,
> etc, but this one is kicking my butt.
>
> My situation: I have a backup of a Fedora 6 system that I'm trying to
> restore to the same system it came from. It attempts to boot, but stalls
> with the message "can't find init (/sbin/init)".
> When I edit the grub line and add the boot command "init = /bin/sh", I
> get a very similar error complaining that it cant find init (/bin/sh).
>
> This is all very similar to this post, which remains unsolved:
> http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/fedora-35/cant-clone-fc6-using-tar-backup-and-restore-506424/
>
> What I've done:
> 1. Verify the listings in grub.conf and fstab are all correct.
> 2. Resinstall grub.
> 3. Disable selinux. Did that via /etc/selinux/config. I also touched an
> .autorelabel file in the root of the hard drive.
> 4. Run fsck. It found & fixed some errors, no change in behavior.
>
> What I can't do:
> 5. Rebuild the initrd. Can't, because when I run in linux rescue mode,
> the "chroot /mnt/sysimage" command fails with the message "can't find
> /bin/sh". Without chrooting, I can't get mkinitrd to work, and I can't
> even get the initrd mounted on a loop device to inspect it. (I'm doing
> this on another computer now.) I note that this problem is superficially
> similar to the problem booting in the first place...
>
> TIA. Paul
>
>

-- 
-     _____/     _____/      /           - Jonathan Loran -           -
-    /          /           /                IT Manager               -
-  _____  /   _____  /     /     Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley
-        /          /     /      (510) 643-5146 jloran_at_ssl.berkeley.edu
- ______/    ______/    ______/           AST:7731^29u18e3
                                 
 
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