One of the things you more or less expect to work on a computer is the operating system’s boot loader. This is mainly because it’s something that is fairly basic, and there are many different implementations, etc.

Well, on my main server, I run Debian Linux - and unstable (sid) at that.

Lately, it’s been a _real_ adventure every time the package maintainers decide to update either the Linux Kernel packages, or the bootloader packages. It doesn’t help that Debian’s starting the migration to grub-2.

Today, I got a double-whammy: Not only is grub-2 unable to load my kernel (apparently there’s a missing symbol in the ‘linux’ bootloader), but the kernel itself is also bad (missing software RAID).

I got around the first one by noticing something called ‘linux16’ and ‘initramfs 16.’ I have no idea what these really are, but they allowed me to boot the kernel, which is good enough for me.

And then I discovered the latest kernel didn’t have the mdraid modules, which makes it impossible to mount my root filesystem.

So, now I’m booting the last “known good” kernel, and (of course), it’s been long enough since my last fsck that it just has to run.

It’ll be interesting to see what has to change so that I can get grub to work, and to get linux to boot with the latest kernel... Sigh... I might have to open a bug report or something...

Tags: Computing, Linux