# can't boot dell inspiron 1545 to 3.6.11 kerrnel  (solved)

## nlsa8z6zoz7lyih3ap

The device   /dev/sda  is found by this kernel but it finds none of the partitions, and hence won't boot.

I have already successfully updated 2 desktops and and one HP pavillion  laptop to this kerne from 3.5.7

without problems, but  but I am unable to succeed with the inspiron.  I have checked with lspci -k

and ensured that all of the relevant kernel drivers are compiled into the kernel.

Although I normally configure my own kernel I have also  tried genkernel, with no success.

Has anyone else experience a similar problem or have any insight into what is going on? The 3.7 kernel also fails to find

the partitions although it finds /dev/sda.

This is not really an emergency as the 3.5.7 kernel works just fine, but  I am curious to understand the nature of the problem.

PS The rootfs is encrypted with luks and the boot process is assisted by the simple initramfs from one of the gentoo wikis, but I do no think that this is the source of the problem. The other 3 machines that I upgraded also had luks encrypted root.Last edited by nlsa8z6zoz7lyih3ap on Thu Jan 17, 2013 1:11 am; edited 1 time in total

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## audiodef

What's the exact error message? It sounds like a hard disk driver issue.

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## nlsa8z6zoz7lyih3ap

 *Quote:*   

> What's the exact error message? It sounds like a hard disk driver issue

 

That is not so easy to answer as my many different attempts yield many different error messages.  Also, If the message is long involving technical numbers, I probably could not copy it down exactly without error.

However as it stands now, I have managed to configure the kernel     with the help of make defconfig  and then make menuconfig so that the partitions can now be found, but it still does not boot successfully.

Here are 2 situations:

(1) Using genkernel's initramfs:  I am now asked for the encrypted root password.         When I give it the response is

                        "mounting /dev/mapper/root as root failed: invalid argument"

(2) Using the initramfs from the gentoo wiki "a simplified initramfs for encyrpted root"

   I am asked for the password. When I give it the response is

      "mounting /dev/mapper/root failed:  no such device"

Yet in both cases (1) and (2) my tests show that /dev/sda7, the luks encrypted root, has been detected.  Specifically, by inserting

"find|grep /dev/sda7"  into the init,  I get  "/dev/sda7", which I didn't yesterday. 

Both the intramfs 's from (1) and (2) work successfully with a 3.5 kernel.

Quite the   mystery as the other laptop that I upgraded successfully  had the same lspci -k output, except for the network drivers.

As I mentioned this is only a puzzle to me, not a problem as the laptop works just fine on the 3.5 kernels.

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## nlsa8z6zoz7lyih3ap

I now have successfully  configured the gentoo-sources-3.6.11 kernel so that it boots with a luks encrypted root.

I had almost achieved this by the time of my last post but,  the filesystem of the root (ext4) had accidentally  been removed from the configuration. 

Many thanks to audiodef for offering to help and my apologies for not supplying him with the technical error messages that he would have needed to do so.

Suffice to say, upgrading from the 3.5 kernel using "make oldconfig"

did not work, although it did on my other 3 machines. However the approach mentioned in  my post yesterday, plus adding ext4 (rootfstype) did.

  I would be happy to share the configuration if anyone wants it, otherwise I will  spare the forums the bloat of storing it forever. 

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