Trying to solve some network stupid network problems, I upgraded one of our laptops from dapper to edgy. It came off without a hitch, and seemed to fix the problem: the machine would forget which /etc/hosts file it was supposed to be using on reboot.
It went so well, in fact, that I decided to move our other laptop, the one I use primarily to feisty. This was a little more troublesome.
The packages downloaded and installed, no problem, but when it came time to reboot, the boot procedure would hang, complaining that /dev/hda6, the boot partition, could not be found. I dug around a little, and discovered that, when booting kernel 2.6.20 (only, not previous kernels as demonstrated when I picked 2.6.17 at bootup), the hard disk in the machine was being recognized as scsi, and given a scsi designation (/dev/sda, instead of /dev/hda). I scratched my head and grumbled for a while, went off, had a cup of coffee, surfed fruitlessly for an answer to why it was doing this, and ultimately decided I was going to have to figure it out on my own.
Coming back to the machine, the first thing I did was look at the boot parameters. At the appropriate state of the bootstrap procedure, I pressed ESC to get to the grub prompt, Picked the line for booting 2.6.20-16, and 'e' to edit it.
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.20-16-386 root=/dev/hda6 ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.20-16-386
quiet
savedefault
Well, there's a problem. It's looking on the non-existent /dev/hda6 partition for the root directory. I changed it to sda6 and booted.
Bingo. That was easy
.
To make the change stick, I edited /boot/grub/menu.lst to reflect the change I made at the grub command editor.
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