Friday, September 26, 2008

How to fix “Unable to mount root fs ” Error

Mount point has been created and given to me by the NetAPP engineer. I mounted the space on host. After a performed the mount for some reason it started showing up some wired error message like when I ran “vmware-cmd –l ” I get a message vmware auth failed to login. I thought something really goofed up when I created the “VMKernal” to access NFS mount. I decided to reboot the host and see if that clear the error messages but no it has created more problems for me. When I rebooted the host it gave me message

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Something really bad happened ☹ . I started hunting on google to got some clue

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-kernel/7283-kernal-panic-vfs-unable-mount-root-fs-00-00-a.html

I decided to change boot parameters. In order to do so let the machine boots up and then when you get this screen

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Here you press “E or e ” on Key board and it will take you the screen

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Again press “E or e” and then it will give you option where you can edit the field and type the value as suggested in the earlier link.

it says above that i gotta change "LABEL=/" to "/dev/hda0"

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Once you are done with editing then reboot the host. But in my case situation still persist. So I decided to do more google and here is the command which work like a butter.

esxcfg-boot ”

Follow the steps.

1. Boot the system and wait till you see following screen .Select here “Service Console only”

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2. It will let you inter through into service console (Everything is done through physical connection like ILO).

3. Once you logged in then run the command in following order

1. esxcfg-boot –p

2. esxcfg-boot -b

3. esxcfg-boot –r

Reboot the host and select “VMware ESX server ” and host should bring of the esx.

4 comments:

glfp said...

Yeah ! Your post was really useful for me ! Thanks a lot for your instructions.

Greetings from Italy !

Wim Teuwens (Belgium) said...

ESX crashed just before going home....pulled out all my hairs after 1 minute....found your post after 2 minutes ... server back running after 5 minutes....ordered a wig after 10 minutes....

Thanks Roy.
thank you...thank you...thank you...

Vikash Kumar Roy said...

I am glad that my post helped :). I have struggled a lot to get this solution so I can very much understand how frustrating the situation would be.

Victoria Bellisario (Katmandu) said...

Excellent post, helped me out no end and had my esx 3.0.1 up and running again in 5 minutes.... avoided a ton of stress at 5pm on a Friday evening. Later, I will be sitting down to eat my crispy shredded chilli beef stress-free yay!