I just cloned my root partition (in anticipation of a dist-upgrade), changed lilo.conf and fstab (in the cloned partition) and ran lilo.
But alas the system won't boot from the cloned partition. I can see a few pages of unsuspicous kernel messages, then it just stops.
For some reason I tried to boot from the good partition, adding init=/bin/sh and again the system didn't boot and stopped at the same kernel message. This made be believe that "there is something wrong with init".
So I decided to turn the tables and passed init=/sbin/init when booting from the "bad" partition and this indeed worked - the system booted just fine.
But I don't understand what's going on here. Does anyone have an explanation for this?
Here's my lilo,conf
# Automatically added by lilo postinst script
large-memory
lba32
boot=/dev/sda
root=/dev/sda3
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
delay=30
timeout=30
vga=normal
default="Linux-3.8.2"
image=/boot/vmlinuz-3.8.2-ext4
root=/dev/sda3
label="Linux-3.8.2"
vga=0x317
image=/boot/vmlinuz-3.8.2-ext4
root=/dev/sdd3
label="Linux-3.8.2-bak"
vga=0x317
Edit: These are the kernel messages
[ 3.258242] sd 6:0:0:1: [sdf] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 3.262845] sd 6:0:0:1: [sdf] Attached SCSI removable disk
if it stops then at this point and I won't see any of these:
[ 3.490096] firewire_core 0000:07:06.0: created device fw0: GUID 00ca308600001a4d, S400
[ 3.513091] nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.
[ 3.517657] Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint
[ 3.818951] vgaarb: device changed decodes: PCI:0000:01:00.0,olddecodes=io+mem,decodes=none:owns=io+mem
[ 3.823236] NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86 Kernel Module 310.40 Sun Mar 3 20:44:11 PST 2013
