Wednesday, January 20, 2010

How to Stop "Kinit: No Resume" Error Message in Debian Lenny

Suspend, Hibernate and Resume are great features in modern mobile computing. So, it's good to have them in your Operating System, be it Linux or OS X or Windows. However, these features require more resources in terms of physical/swap memory. And some people don't like it.

On user-level you can disable it by removing the userspace Suspend/Hibernate packages. But sometimes removing those packages don't do the job completely. You may still get an error message like the two lines I got during my Debian Lenny boot process:

kinit: Trying to resume from /dev/sda5
kinit: No resume image, doing normal boot


I had removed suspend/hibernate packages quite earlier. Wondered why that message came till I knew it's a kernel feature these days. So, to disable resume, you have to tell the kernel not to seek for it. Just add noresume in the kernel line of /boot/grub/menu.lst file. See the example:

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.26-2-686
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-686 root=/dev/sda1 ro quiet noresume
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-686


After adding noresume to the kernel line you will get rid of that "No resume...." error message, and may be, save a few seconds of boot time.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Restoring GRUB through PCLinuxOS LiveCD

restoring grub through pclinuxos livecd
Distro-hopping or multi-OS-booting sometimes results in a non-booting grub. You can use PCLinuxOS (or any other) LiveCD to restore grub in a safe way. Here are the steps:

1. Boot system from PCLinuxOS LiveCD
2. Open a terminal and be root user - enter "su"
3. Enter command "grub" (it will put you on grub> prompt)
4. Then locate grub files by: "find /boot/grub/stage1"
5. It will return grub locations (it may be (hd0,0) or (sd0,0))
6. As per the location of grub enter "root (hd0,0)" or "root (sd0,0)" or some other.
7. Then issue "setup (hd0)" or "setup (sd0)" or some other.
8. Finally enter "quit"

Now reboot the computer without LiveCD.

Note: Use commands without quotes.

How about this