Boot hangs with message 'Waiting for root file system'

Do you have any kind of special configurations for your root file system? It looks as if the kernel is having trouble interacting with the file system. Perhaps adding some files to your report such as /etc/fstab. I only ask this since I am not having any trouble with a laptop, but it's just an IDE hard drive. Also, any information you can gather from the system logs on your computer may be helpful. Thanks.

I've attached the fstab per Alex (thanks for the suggestion). I'd be happy to provide any further logs or such -- please just let me know what would be helpful.

BTW, I'm actually have the same Edgy configuration running in vmware in 2 separate machines and am experiencing the same problem with each.

I experienced this problem again and discovered I'd be dropped into busybox after a wait. I receive this error: ALERT! /dev/sda1 does not exist. Dropping to shell!

If someone could give me some suggestions on commands to run to produce diagnostic info, I'd appreciate it.

On Sep 13, 2006, at 7:00 PM, Rob Moore wrote:

> I experienced this problem again and discovered I'd be dropped into
> busybox after a wait. I receive this error: ALERT! /dev/sda1 does not
> exist. Dropping to shell!

Edit the grub entry (from the grub menu on boot) so that it uses /dev/
hda1 instead. This is what I consider an installer bug, because we
changed some sata drives back to ide. However, the grub menu uses
root=/dev/sda1 when it should be using root=UUID=XXX....

When you complete the boot, edit /boot/grub/menu.lst, and remove the
kopt_2_6 line, then rerun "sudo update-grub".

Thanks, Ben. That did the trick.

This is really an installer bug, one which I'm sure is already filed.

Same problem, if in my /etc/hosts, I put my computer name on 127.0.0.1 :

$ cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost rom-laptop
#127.0.1.1 rom-laptop

it resolves the problem.