Re: Prepping to install: a digression

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Mon, 13 Jul 2015 21:57:46 -0453
    From:        "William A. Mahaffey III" <wam%hiwaay.net@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <55A47933.1020505%hiwaay.net@localhost>


  | Hmmmmm .... I *think* that's where I am now, from earlier today & a few 
  | days ago (from boot attempt from disks, *not* USB):

Sorry, have not been looking at mail for (almost) 24 hours...   And yes,
you are there now.   The last I saw you reported you were failing to boot
at all, obviously that has been fixed, and I missed it.

  |  Am I looking for the word 'autoconfigure' explicitly ?

No, just the messages where all the hardware is listed.  The "boot device"
(etc) lines you showed appear right at (or near) the end of the autoconfig
process.

Since you're at that stage, do what Christos suggested, boot from the
USB, and do the "raidctl -A softroot raid0" (or if the system you're
using is old enough that it doesn't recognise "softroot" then use just "root")

You already tested that what's on the root partition seems to be all OK,
so with this, at the very least, you should get to the state where you can
get to single user mode, even if there's still something not configured
correctly that prevents multi-user mode working correctly.

Also, to answer a later message ... the boot time messages do get saved to
a file - but for that to happen, the filesystem needs to exist first, and
for you that hasn't happened (as far as the kernel is concerned) yet.
Until after you have a mounted root filesystem there is nowhere available
to put a file, so all that data is just buffered in RAM, waiting for later
to get written out - that happens as part of the later boot process.

But it doesn't matter, aside from the boot time keyboard problem, I suspect
everything will work now, or be very close to it.

kre