Yelläks /ˈyæl•eks/

Sometimes and unpredictable the root filesystem could not be mounted during boot causing the kernel to drop to busybox saying something like:

mount: Mounting /dev/root on /root failed: no such device
mount: Mounting /root/dev on /dev/.static/dev failed: no such file or directory
mount: Mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: no such file or directory
mount: Mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: no such file or directory
Target filesystem doesn’t have /sbin/init

Repeating the same mount commands at the command line worked flawlessly, but drove the kernel into a kernel panic, when the boot sequence continued. I cannot remember why and I did not investigate that further.

However when I removed all parameters given in the kernel line in grub, the boot sequence completed without any problems. Recently I read somewhere that there is a problem in detecting the kind of filesystem used (ext3, ext4, reiserFS, etc) and there is somewhat a mix up. Telling the kernel, what filesystem is used especially for the root filesystem, helped a lot and so far I did not experience this problem again. Just add rootfstype to the kernel boot option so that your menu.lst in /boot/grub/ looks like this:

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.28.8-6
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.28.8-6 root=/dev/sda5 ro rootfstype=ext4 resume=/dev/sda3
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.28.8-6

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.28.8-6 (single-user mode)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.28.8-6 root=/dev/sda5 ro rootfstype=ext4 single
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.28.8-6

You need to replace the value (ext4) by your own filesystem.