more problems migrating to RAID1

Jack Howarth howarth at bromo.msbb.uc.edu
Sun Mar 26 20:02:12 UTC 2006


Les,
    The fact that I see...

Uncompressing Linux ... Ok, booting the kernel.
hdd: No disk in drive
Red Hat nash version 5.0.32 starting
mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root'
setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory
(a couple more similar lines were printed out)
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

suggests that I am getting the initrd.img loaded from /boot.
Also as I currently understand it the /boot directory will
always be used off of the hda drive unless you do something
fancy when grub is setup on hda. It seems that my problem
has to do with the initrd.img not properly supporting raid1
despite manually rebuilding it mkinitrd using --preload raid1.
Looking at the contents of a initrd.img from a working raid-1
system I noticed the init file in it has entries like...

raidautorun /dev/md0
raidautorun /dev/md1
raidautorun /dev/md2

Also I have read conflicting comments about booting with raid1
as a module. While this obviously works on Fedora, the problems
people have with it makes me think the module form needs more
configuration then when the kernel has raid1 builtin. My current
plan is to try...

1) Make sure third boot selector option still boots partitions on hda
2) Shutdown and detach hda
3) Reboot from linux rescue cd (disk 1 will do)
4) Make sure /mnt/sysimage has hde md partitions mounted as raid1
5) Chroot /mnt/sysimage
6) Reinstall current kernel rpm
7) Shutdown and reattach hda
8) Reboot with third boot selector option, mount the md partitions
on hde and copy initrd.img from /mnt/boot/ to /boot on hda. 
9) Now reattempt to boot to boot selection 1 or 2 from hda.

I am hoping this will allow the md partitions on hde to be booted
from despite the presence of normal paritions on hda. As a last
resort I could always detach hda, boot from the linux rescue cd,
chroot the /mnt/sysimage of the md partitions and setup grub on
hde. However I am unclear how I could reattach hda again without
causing the MBR on it to be used. I suspect I would have to
attach it as hdf and wipe the MBR first (which I don't know how
to do) before I could reattach it as hda. 
       Jack




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