Ubuntu 10.04: UDEVADM Trigger Is Not Permitted While UDEV Is Unconfigured

In the process of installing Ubuntu 10.04, I got an error message:  "udevadm trigger is not permitted while udev is unconfigured."  Trying to reboot into Windows XP on that dual-boot computer led to the same error message.  This post describes my efforts to resolve that error.

As I looked into it, I found some indications that this was due to a bug in Ubuntu.  In my case, the immediate trigger seemed to be the decision to use an "installed-software" package (as described in the main installation post) to restore many of my previously installed programs at once.  Alternately, it may have been due to the concomitant effort to set up a separate home partition.

At least one user fixed this problem by using a different kernel.  I didn't seem to have any other kernels on my machine at this point, so I started over and re-did the basic Ubuntu installation.  This time, I installed everything to the root partition.  I rebooted, copied over my backup of fstab, changed it to reflect the new root partition's UUID, and rebooted.  Having discovered that I had made some mistakes in the separate home partition process, I tried that once more, and now that worked too.  I rebooted and ran installed-software (above).  This time, I declined to erase previously downloaded .deb files.  I rebooted again.  Unfortunately, I now had that udevadm message again.  Examining it more closely, I saw that, after a minute or two, it went on to say this:

ALERT!  /dev/disk/by-uuid/xxxxxxxxxxx does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

where "xxxxxxxxxxx" stands for a UUID.  Which UUID?  I could not figure out how to do things in the shell that opened up, so I rebooted with the Ubuntu Live CD.

According to fstab, the UUID belonged to my Ubuntu programs partition.  I typed "sudo blkid" and compared its output.  Fstab was correct:  it was identifying the UUID for that partition.  So when Ubuntu would try to boot, it would not find itself.  How was that possible?  This seemed to be a GRUB problem.  Following advice, I opened /etc/default/Grub and uncommented (i.e., removed the leading # sign from) the line that read "GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true."

I was then supposed to run update-grub, but I didn't know how to do that from a Live CD boot.  One post said that it was possible; I needed to do so "from inside a chroot environment."  Wikipedia seemed to say that chroot means "change root"; the idea was that I would use chroot so that, when I was running a program (e.g., update-grub) as root, the "root user" doing so would be that of the hard drive, not of the CD.  A Community Documentation page told me that it was "a special directory on your computer which prevents applications, if run from inside that directory, from accessing files outside that directory . . . like installing another operating system inside your existing operating system."  In other words, I needed to use chroot and then run update-grub as the root of my Ubuntu installation.  Unfortunately, the procedure described in that Community Documentation page required me to begin by installing dchroot and debootstrap, and I wasn't able to do that.

Something made me think that Super Grub Disk, which I had forgotten about, could provide a solution.  Looking into that led me to Rescatux instead.  But then the Super Grub Disk wiki said that Auto Super Grub Disk (ASGD) was the easiest solution for a Windows user.  Working on another computer, I downloaded it.  I expected an ISO, but it was an executable (.exe) file, so I ran it.  It gave me a dialog that seemed to be wiling to install ASGD on a USB drive, so I plugged one in, designated ASGD (not SGD) and USB (not hard drive) as my options (I had to restart ASGD to get it to see the drive), and clicked OK.  After a minute, it said "Installation Complete, Reboot."  So I plugged the USB drive into the troubled computer and did that, making sure to choose USB (actually, USB-HDD) as my first boot device in BIOS.  But it said, "BOOTMGR is missing."

So now I did try Rescatux.  I downloaded it, burned it to a CD, and booted it.  Its wizard came up, and I killed it.  But then it turned out that the wizard was the main thing, though the program did have a nice interface reminiscent of BartPE, with an applications menu and so forth.  Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to get the wizard back, so I had to restart it.  (The instructions on the SGD wiki were incorrect, and it was apparently not possible to edit pages or become a new user of the wiki.)  This time, from the Rescatux wizard, I chose GRUB options > grub-install > run.  It auto-selected my Ubuntu partition.  But then it said, "Which hard disk to install Linux on?"  I didn't want it to install Linux anywhere.  It made me nervous.  Anyway, I didn't want it to install GRUB either; I feared that would just wipe out the Windows part of my GRUB menu and give me a new problem to fix.

I tried again, this time with Super GRUB2 Disk.  The SGD wiki advised me to enter certain commands from the prompt, but did not say how to get to a prompt.  I tried the SGD option for "Detect any GRUB2 configuration file (grub.cfg)."  It found only one and seemed to be offering to load it.  I went with that.  It ran the GRUB menu OK and that took me to the udevadm error message.  Great.  I rebooted the SGD and tried the "Enable serial terminal" option.  But that just brought me back to the menu.  Tried it again; same result.

Back to the drawing board.  I found a different Ubuntu wiki page on how to recover GRUB2 via Live CD.  This seemed more on target.  It called for booting the Ubuntu Live CD, opening Terminal, and typing "sudo blkid" to get the device where Ubuntu was installed.  In my case, it was /dev/sdb8.  So then I typed "sudo mount /dev/sdb8 /mnt."  I didn't have /boot or /var on separate partitions, so I could just go directly to these commands:

sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/devsudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/procsudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/syssudo chroot /mntupdate-grubexitsudo umount /mnt/devsudo umount /mnt/syssudo umount /mnt/procsudo umount /mnt

Then I rebooted.  Went through the GRUB menu; still got the UDEVADM message.  Back at the starting point, I tried searching again for answers to that error message.  Following an approach that seemed to work for some people, I started by booting the system and getting to my GRUB menu.  I hit the down-arrow key to stop the clock so that I could copy down the number of the Linux kernel I was trying to install.  In my case, it was 2.6.32-24-generic-pae.  (Alternately, I could have just typed "ls /boot" as one of the following commands.)  Having already found that Ubuntu was installed on /dev/sdb8, I rebooted with the Live CD, opened Terminal, and typed this:

sudo mkdir /media/newrootsudo mount /dev/sdb8 /media/newrootsudo chroot /media/newrootapt-get updateapt-get dist-upgrade

I rebooted and sat back to watch.  No joy.  Still got UDEVADM.  I rebooted the live CD and tried a modification of those commands:  redid the first three, down through the chroot step, but then typed "sudo update-initramfs -u -k 2.6.32-24-generic-pae."  This brought several error messages:  "Unable to resolve host ubuntu" and "No such file or directory" (in connection with an automatically generated "grep:  /proc/modules" command).  I rebooted, wishing these error messages wouldn't matter -- and, woo hoo! what do you know, they didn't!  I was booting into Ubuntu.  It ran a check on my disks, and that was the end of the story!