[GLLUG] Initrd issue

[Tim Woodall]

On Mon, 12 Mar 2018, Ken Smith via GLLUG wrote:

> Hi All,
>
>
> I know this is a long shot but I'm helping a colleague virtualise (Hyper-V) a 
> RedHat 8 system. Yes I know - ssh, tls, and on an on are full of holes. But 
> they have an application on the machine and well anyway......something about 
> the 2.4 kernel and the version of gcc.... Its burried inside a lan and has no 
> internet exposure. Anyway here's the issue....
>
>
> I've done a test plain RH8 installation on Hyper-V and it runs fine, much to 
> my surprise. So even if its not supported it seems to work, network and all.
>
> Meanwhile on the P to V migrated system I've fixed up grub, grub.conf and 
> fstab and rebuilt the initrd. I think its running the nash scripts in the 
> initrd and I get the error:
>
> Warning: Unable to open the initial console.
>
> Earlier I was having a problem when running the RH8 rescue system. I found 
> that the /dev/ filesystem needed manually mounted in /mnt/sysimage/dev before 
> I did "chroot /mnt/sysimage". grub-install wouldn't work without the manual 
> mount of /dev. I wonder if this is related. /dev/console is there when I run 
> mkinitrd with /dev mounted manually. But there is probably something else in 
> there I've missed. I removed the original cciss statement from modules.conf 
> to stop it looking for the raid controller on the original host. I would have 
> thought the a basic vga console module would be in there anyway but perhaps 
> not...
>
> Any clues???
>
I use debian almost exclusively so this may not help but:

I saw something similar when using Xen and uefi boot. Plain old bios
boot worked fine (and fortunately my particular motherboard had a
"legacy boot" mode)

Boot of a normal system rather than a hypervisor using uefi and the
console worked fine.

IME I've always had to do mount -o bind /dev dev, ditto proc and sys
before a chroot and make-initramfs. It always complains about /dev/pts
not being mounted but it's never seemed to have mattered.

Tim.