initramfs + busybox trouble installing

[dymaxion]

Maybe I'll give Fedora a whirl, given that we use RHEL 5 at work, maybe this will be a better fit Shame Ubuntu is broken eh...

Anyone got any recommendations of Fedora over Suse? Given that I have a VAIO TT and worried about running into driver issues given how new my hardware is....

[vs8]

Fedora plays a bit nicer with drivers and in some cases you don't need proprietary drivers to enable desktop effects. They have a very nice repo called rpmfusion, it's very good. Fedora has some nice features and the login screen after you install it is the best ever.

Overall its fine.

[knightrider37876]

Any word of a fix for Ubuntu yet? I'm wanting to put it on my wife's laptop as right now it has Vista... blah!

[jdeal]

I just want to add myself to the people having the problems listed here.

System: Vostro 200, 3 GB RAM, 320 GB disk dualboot with Vista purchased August 2008

I first installed 8.04.1 (64-bit) in August and it worked fine. Starting in November I started getting the ata1.00: Revaluation Failed errno=5 errors after an update. I actually got then once or twice before but a reboot always worked. Now it fails all the time. The interesting part is the CD I used to install also fails as well as a 8.04.1 32-bit and a 6.06 LTS CD. However Vista boots every time as does my Fedora F10 (alpha) Live CD and Fedora F9 DVD.

I purchased this system specifically to work on the Ubuntu version of an open-source project (Kompozer). I have spent days, off and on, during the last month trying to resolve this. It just seems so arbitrary when it works and when it doesn't. I did try the solutions mentioned in this and other threads but no luck. Like a previous post, mine also seemed to be a warmup issue so I would run Vista for an hour or so then reboot to Ubuntu. Sometime that worked. Now that does not work either.

Being an old embedded software engineer, this kind of behavior usually pointed to some kind of initialization and/or timing issue or missed interrupt. Very fustrating.

I am mostly a Fedora person but I was really getting to like Ubuntu. I have recently installed almost 100 Ubuntu 8.04 systems and except for some HP Xeon processor systems really did not have any problems. I have it on my laptop and it works great (however, after reading about the bad update experience of others with 8.04.1 I have not applied any updates).

As far as my Vostro 200, I am throwing in the towel. I am moving it to Fedora 10 since it seems that Ubuntu 8.10 does not fix this either. Bummer!

[Zehuti]

Well, this issue rather annoyed me, and after reading through 15 pages of this thread, I finally decided to try my other disk drive (it's slower, so I didn't want to use it). But sure enough, it fixed it.. Thanks for all of the help, I love this community

- This is with Ubuntu 8.10, ABIT AW9D-MAX

[RJARRRPCGP]

FIXED!

The hard drive UUID in my GRUB menu.lst was wrong. I had swapped out my hard drive when my machine was running Gutsy. I had fixed the UUID in /etc/fstab (you have to or you can't login). However I never changed the UUID in /boot/grub/menu.lst and when I upgraded to Hardy I used the new "merge" capability to get my new menu.lst file.

Apparently Gutsy didn't care the UUID was wrong, but Hardy does. I booted into windows, copied the UUID from fstab and pasted it into menu.lst I now I am swimming in 8.04 goodness.

Oh, the fstab! -> That's after the kernel loads. Oops.

It looks like a failure of detecting the IDE controller (includes SATA) or the IDE controller (includes SATA) being unsupported.

[21Jerry]

OK guys, I've tried everything in the past 29 pages. I am pretty sure the motherboard is a P400E Asus.

The problem varies by drive. At first I couldn't get the install to finish after the boot post wubi. I moved to a different drive and the install finished after trying about 50 times and then the initramfs prompt came-up on boot.

I played with the raid controller on the mo-board and I can make the symptoms change but can't get past the initramfs. I have 4 dirves on the system plus an IDE CDrom. I can't get the install finished on the two drive attached to the IDE connectors but it will install on the two on the raid controller. Once installed on the raid connected drives, I get the initramfs prompt on normal boot. go figure.

I am using 8.04 for EMC2 and the CD boots, I can run but can't instal.

Jerry

[21Jerry]

solved my problem. Since I had installed under XP, I had to ensure XP was shutdown properly. Without a proper XP shutdown, I get the initramfs fall-out.

Thanks anyway,


Jerry

[Kopachris]

Okay, I'm adding myself to the list of people with this problem, although the nature of the problem is a bit different in my case.

I built a LiveDVD from my Intrepid Installation. Well, one of them, anyway. The one that I'm using as a base DustbunnyOS installation, hence the creation of the LiveDVD. I've tried everything in the first 10 pages that apply to my situation. I have no SATA or RAID, and I use and ASUS mobo. The floppy thing might have applied to me (so I tried it) because I had to plug the floppy power cable into my new video card to get it to work. So now my floppy drive has now power, but the ribbon cable is still plugged into the mobo.

I'll be looking through the various configuration files in the work directory to see if I can figure it out. In the mean time, my main Intrepid installation still works perfectly.
Let me know if someone figures this whole BusyBox fiasco out, and I'll let you know if I figure it out!

[celtic_hackr]

Just going to add my $0.02 here. When is Ubuntu going to fix this bug?

Here's another system affected: Acer Aspire 4730z. Intel dual core T3250 (iirc) + Atheros, 2GHz, 2GB, 14.1". This drops to a busybox initramfs console. This is to be a xmas gift for a nontechie, barely pc literate user. I could make this work for Ubuntu (actually Mint + KDE), but then since Ubuntu doesn't care to ever fix this bug it'll be a maintenance nag for me. So when is Ubuntu going to fix this? Oh well, I guess I'll install some other debian based distro. Or maybe fedora 10. Since it worked out-of-the-box, I may leave it.

UPDATE: The Linux Mint release Felicia Main Release, which is based on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 works fine with the aforementioned computer. However, this is a default Gnome desktop. I'm a KDE guy, but this Gnome looks actually usable for the first time ever. Although, I'm sure there's plenty of annoyances down the road if I leave it like this.
So the long and short of it seems to be that Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 should've been tried by me before posting this and maybe this will help others. :/