Xbian hangs during boot saying "Switching root"

[Rilhas]

(27th Aug, 2013 12:02 AM)mk01 Wrote:  Rilhas, sorry, I didn't get you right.

you will access the /boot from windows. it is FAT filesystem.

what I meant is you can't access the XBIAN filesystems from windows.

again. /boot is fine.

Ah, great!!

The "cmdline.txt" had the following:

sdhci-bcm2708.sync_after_dma=0 dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=tty1 root=LABEL=xbian-root-btrfs rootfsopts=subvol=root/@,noatime,compress=lzo,thread_pool=1,space_cache,autodefrag rootfstype=btrfs rootwait=10 smsc95xx.turbo_mode=N elevator=noop nohdparm loglevel=0 noswap mod_scsi.scan=async

I didn't find any reference to "switch root" in there, so I was unable to place the init=/bin/bash immediately after it. I added it to the end of the file, together with "debug". Here is the resulting file:

sdhci-bcm2708.sync_after_dma=0 dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=tty1 root=LABEL=xbian-root-btrfs rootfsopts=subvol=root/@,noatime,compress=lzo,thread_pool=1,space_cache,autodefrag rootfstype=btrfs rootwait=10 smsc95xx.turbo_mode=N elevator=noop nohdparm loglevel=0 noswap mod_scsi.scan=async debug init=/bin/bash

(there was also a "cmdline.txt.old" with this:
sdhci-bcm2708.sync_after_dma=0 dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=tty1 root=LABEL=xbian-root-btrfs rootfsopts=subvol=root/@,noatime,compress=lzo,thread_pool=1,space_cache,autodefrag rootfstype=btrfs rootwait=10 smsc95xx.turbo_mode=N elevator=noop nohdparm splash logo.nologo quiet loglevel=0 noswap mod_scsi.scan=async
)

The shell showed up, and I was able to edit fstab to add the "nobootwait", just like you said. The "fstab" was then like this:

#
#
#
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
LABEL=xbian-root-btrfs / btrfs subvol=root/@,thread_pool=1,rw,compress=lzo,noatime,autodefrag 0 0
LABEL=xbian-root-btrfs /home btrfs subvol=home/@,thread_pool=1,rw,compress=lzo,noatime,autodefrag 0 0
UUID=8B12-9112 /boot vfat defaults 0 0
UUID=5916829a-80bd-4add-8884-cb06ced01442 /RILHAS-SRV ext3 defaults,exec,errors=remount-ro,nobootwait 0 0


Then I tried editting the command line to remove the shell, but /boot was empty (is this normal??). So I editted it back on my laptop (by removing the bash and leaving the debug) and tried again (without any USB peripherals except for the keyboard and mouse).

The system booted, but XBMC was not started automatically, and a login prompt appeared instead. I logged in and confirmed "xbmc.bin" was not running.

I removed the "debug" in the command line and tried again, but the result was the same and XBMC did not start. I started it manually and it started without any problems.

Then I added "debug" to the command line again (just in case) and tried adding all the USB peripherals, and the system booted. And, surprisingly, so did XBMC.

So I guess it was the "nobootwait" thing in fstab (and maybe XBMC was not booting because I have added media sources from the external USB disk). This solution works well for me because I already had a script waiting for the USB disk to get mounted before starting all the applications in it (legacy from another embedded computer I used before the Pi came along), so it is working just fine.

As for the reason why it worked so many times before and then suddenly stopped booting? No idea. And as for the reason why it always worked without the USB disk and then, after encountering the problem once, it didn't boot even if the disk wasn't there? Also, no idea.

... anyway, I think I remember having to do something else to disable the periodic disk checks, I would not be surprised if all of this was being caused by something related to that. I seem to remember that one component of it was the fstab "trailing zero", but I think there were other components related to the number of days or the number of mounts or something like that. I'll check my notes, I'm sure I've written it down somewhere.

Thanks for your help! :-)