"Still waiting for the root device" problem

This is an annoying message given by the startup process of linux and I got in to the same situation after installing Linux Mint.

Linux mint is a reconfiguration of ubuntu so that it make ease of use for the beginners to Linux. You have everything installed out of the box such as flash plugin for Firefox and MP3 decoding.

After sometime, I got this annoying problem when I was going to do a cold boot (starting up the computer after a shutdown) and later I figured it's not only happening even after a hot boot (reboot). I had been searching a lot about this problem and there were so many posts in forums saying to change the label of the root partition and adjust the grub->menu.lst and etc->fstab. Some had said to use the UUID of the device as the value for the root parameter for the kernel. But all of them didn't work in long term for me.

After all time I though there would be a problem with the bootloader itself. Having that thought I removed the default bootloader for Linux Mint, the grub-gfxboot bootloader and installed the legacy grub bootloader. Here we go, it has fixed the problem for me (so far).

So according to my experience with this I think the grub-gfxboot bootloader sometimes forget how to find the root device no matter how the parameter value is given. So if you also have this "still waiting for the root device" problem and couldn't figure out a solution, it's time to go back to the good old (legacy) grub bootloader.

Cheers

How to check UUID, Label & Filesystem type in Linux

First there should be a little clarification what these things are.

1. UUID - Universally Unique Identifier
This is a kind of an identifier that you can give to a device. Since it is a universally unique identifier, the identification of the device is easy.

2. Label
Label is another way to identify a device but it's not unique. Like in Microsoft Windows you can have more than one device with the same label.

3. Filesystem
It is the method for storing files in a computer system. Different operating systems use different types of file systems such as,
* EXT3/4 - Linux
* HFS/HFS+ - Mac
* NTFS - Windows

In Linux there is a method how you can find these things with a single command.

* Open up a terminal and issue this command without quotes "sudo blkid"

The output will be like this,