Upgrade from Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 in ThinkPad R50e.

Upgrade from Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 in ThinkPad R50e.

I upgraded my computer from 7.04 to 7.10 via update-manager. It works fine with an old kernel but cannot boot from a new kernel which is 2.6.22 version. When I tried to boot from the new kernel, it paused for a while and then gave me a (initramfs) terminal with a message that I implied it could not detect a hard drive. I found out it happened because the initramfs script didn't load ide_generic module to the kernel. I tried to use yaird instead of initramfs-tools, but it doesn't work. I have no idea what's going on.

I solved this problem by compiling a kernel by myself. It's not a best choice to do but I like to have a custom kernel that fits to my computer. Instead of compiling ide_generic and piix as modules, I compiled both of them into the 2.6.22 kernel. I'm happy with the result and it works very well.

I recalled the problem has happened since I did upgrade from 6.10 to 7.04. Fortunately, my computer's running by my custom kernel and it didn't bother me to find out how to use the provided kernel. Just today, 25 Nov, something came up in my mind. When I got a terminal console after waiting for a while as I mention above, I inserted ide_generic module and then the hard drive had been detected. It meant that either 7.10 or kernel 2.6.22 doesn't need to load piix module which I normally used for my notebook to detect the hard drive. I's surprised!!! Moreover, there isn't piix module in the provided kernel. It's been removed for a while I guessed but I didn't notice. It might has happened since 7.04.

To make my computer run by the provided kernel, I edited my own /etc/initramfs-tools/modules from piix to ide_generic and reconfigured the kernel. Everything works very well. I would haven't had the problem if I installed Ubuntu 7.10 instead of upgrading.