initramfs + busybox trouble installing

[Spudgun79]

Right, after a lot of messing about I've managed to get a Hardy Heron/Vista dual-boot (its a necessity) working.

I too started off with a Busy Box error, mainly preceded by the fd0 error, even though it worked fine with Gutsy.

My setup consists of a MSI K9A Platinum V1.0 motherboard with 2 Western Digital 320GB SATA II HDs. After reading this thread and seeing all the MSI issues I wasn't holding out much hope. For my mobo at least there are four SATA settings in the BIOS: Native IDE, AHCI, Legacy IDE & RAID. I finally managed to get Hardy to install and be able to use it by changing this setting to 'Legacy IDE' from 'Native IDE'. RAID was a no-go as then Vista would not work.

The problem with 'Legacy IDE' is it made Vista hideously slow so I really wanted to use 'Native IDE'. After trying everything I had found (all_generic_ide, irqpoll, noirqpoll etc..) for the boot options I tried "pci=nomsi" and everything now works like a charm!

Whether that would have worked straight from the live CD and allowed you to install without messing about with the BIOS I don't know, but I suspect it may well do.

I hope my experience will have the chance to help others. Its very frustrating and stuff like this really needs to be sorted out if Linux is going to go mainstream in the Desktop market. I persevered because I like using Ubuntu.

Can anyone tell me what "pci=nomsi" actually does? I did a quick google, but didn't really come up with much.

[mmbspa]

I have the same problem. 100 gig hard ide drive, 64 amd processor and a cd/dvd drive and thats it. I just jet the initramfs and busy box and when typing help get nowhere.
why cannot the distro writers fix this.
Help????

[mnec20]

I tried to install Ubuntu 8.04 LTS around a month ago and had the same problem as everybody else here. I ended up giving up on Ubuntu since nothing described in this topic helped at all, including the commands on start up and bios tweaking.
I tried agian a few minutes ago using the pci=nomsi argument and strangely enough it worked!! Ubuntu is being installed on my desktop as I write this on my laptop. Problem is: this "busybox" stuff is NOT SOLVED. I'm afraid it may happen again sometime soon since I've done nothing different than what I tried the other time. I'm obviously new to Linux so I'd like to ask special attention from the power users and developers about this matter so future releases won't be so troublesome.

[paul cooke]

I'm extremely unhappy with this problem.

1) I have a borked laptop which won't boot after upgrade from gutsy to hardy. It dumps me in the busybox with the ridiculously long can't find UUID error...

2) I have my primary machine still back on Dapper and Firefox 3 doesn't run on it... and there don't appears to be support for it now either...

I'm stuck with a dead laptop and I'm too scared to attempt the upgrade from Dapper to Hardy on my other boxes. I've had my fingers burnt too often before on rpm based systems with apparently easy upgrades that fell over completely.

This dumping people into busybox is, as far as I'm concerned, a serious showstopper and will really give a sour taste for both newcomers and experienced hands.

My laptop isn't anything special... just an old Sony VAIO with a good old fashioned IDE drive, none of this fancy SATA stuff...

[herdivet]

Okay, here's a fix I used that worked for me. I was going to link to it, but I cannot find it on the forums now. it was originally posted by PriceChild.

REPAiRING YOUR BROKEN HARDY INSTALL

If you can, it is preferable to just boot using a backup kernel or into recovery mode and update from there. If you can't:

*Boot up a live cd, or separate Linux install
*Mount your Hardy drive somewhere (replace **** with name of drive, e.g. hda1 or sda2 etc)

code:
sudo mkdir /media/hardy
sudo mount /dev/**** /media/hardy

* chroot into your hardy drive

code:
sudo chroot /media/hardy
su

*Update your system via apt as normal (sudo not required)

code:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

*Ctrl+d or type "exit" to exit the chroot, then reboot the computer and you should be able to get back in to Hardy.


That's what was in the post. I have multiple Hardy's, one I have to use the all_generic_ide irqpoll at all times, the other will fall in to busybox on occasion and until I do this process it won't come out.

Hope this helps. Hate to see anyone giving up because of this.

[mmbspa]

Some of us newbees have not done command line work in a while so be a litter nicer. Grow up.

[cobraspyguy]

So does previous versions work? I was hoping to get away from Vista and not go back to XP but this seems like deja vu. Have to use an older version of buntu to get it to work. I guess microsoft isnt so bad after all.

[paul cooke]

Okay, here's a fix I used that worked for me. I was going to link to it, but I cannot find it on the forums now. it was originally posted by PriceChild.

REPAiRING YOUR BROKEN HARDY INSTALL

If you can, it is preferable to just boot using a backup kernel or into recovery mode and update from there. [...]

Hope this helps. Hate to see anyone giving up because of this.

thanks, I managed to get in via an old kernel that was in the grub menu...

busy installing some 305 mb of updates right now... will get back with yey or ney when it's all finished.

[paul cooke]

thanks, I managed to get in via an old kernel that was in the grub menu...

busy installing some 305 mb of updates right now... will get back with yey or ney when it's all finished.

it's a yey...

laptop rebooted fine

[joele]

Tried all the suggestions in this thread, wasted most of the night.. got nowhere.. Back to Vista (it installs fine)..

If I wanted to screw around this much I would use Gentoo again...