[linux-lvm] Booting into LVM

Roger Lucas roger at planbit.co.uk
Fri Feb 17 14:04:45 UTC 2006


I am trying to boot into LVM and am having some problems.  Here is a
summary:

I have a server with a hardware RAID system (which provides logical SCSI
disks) which I want to have running as early as possible in the boot
process.  I cannot boot directly into it, so I have a small (32MB) IDE-FLASH
device onto which I wish to put a standard Linux boot partition.  My plan is
to install LVM onto the (large) RAID system and use logical volumes for "/",
"/var/", etc.

I did a "stock" Debian install and it all worked fine.  The boot partition
is on the IDE-FLASH disk and all the other partitions are via LVM on logical
volumes from the 4TB RAID array.  Unfortunately, the kernel is 2.6.8.  I
need to run 2.6.14 so I built up a new kernel image using the original
sources and a load of patches that I needed.  This kernel image works fine
on other machines, but it will not boot on this machine.  It complains that
it cannot mount "mapper/root" when the Grub line is "root=/dev/mapper/root".

My guess is that LVM isn't being loaded/started/configured correctly at boot
time or that there is some problem with "/dev"...

Can anyone shed any light on this?

Thanks,

Roger




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