<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=windows-1252" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#000000" text="#ffffff"> What does it say when you run dmraid -ay from the prompt? Is the mapper device module loaded at that point? I wrote up a howto for ubuntu at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FakeRaidHowto">https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FakeRaidHowto</a>. You might want to take a look at that, but the idea is that I simply added a script to the proper location that directs mkinitramfs to include dmraid in the image and run it after loading the mapper module. Andre Hasekamp wrote: <blockquote cite="mid437770FA.909@netscape.net" type="cite">Hi, This must be a straightforward one for all you people booting from a disk array with the support of dmraid. The issue is simply this. When I do: dmraid -ay dmraid -sa in a running non-RAID system, everything is fine, the second command shows my RAID set is active. Now, when I give the same 2 commands in init on initrd, my RAID set is not active (or, dmraid -si then indeed shows that my RAID set is not active). Hopefully someone can give me a tip that helps me get dmraid started on initrd. Next follows a detailed description of my environment. Detailed, because after what I've been through until now, it can only be the "little" things that make the "big" difference. Since I stumble over this problem for a while now, I can say that I tried with different SuSe Linux distributions and with different dmraid versions. At the moment I use SuSe 10.0 (kernel 2.6.13.15- smp) and dmraid 1.0.0.rc9. My RAID controller is a Promise FastTrak S150 TX4 with 2 SATA disks connected to it in RAID 0 mode. The dmraid device name for the FastTrak controller becomes pdc_dbhbgbjdgi. Eventually, of course, I'm trying to do something like Lin, Weichuan described in the thread "How-to for dmraid OS drive(s)?" in this discussion group. This thread had been started on 2005-08-22. So, first I made a static link of dmraid and tested it in the running system where I set PATH="", to make sure I used the right dmraid. Then I see that everyone modifies mkinitrd. Unfortunately for this problem, mkinitrd is different for different distributions, so I cannot simply adopt what others in this discussion group publish. To keep things as simple as possible, I decided to go "back to the basics" and I simply unzipped and un-cpio- ed the SuSe initrd and modified that one. By now (version 10.0) SuSe has had good reasons (probably in the context of migrating to udev) to replace "linuxrc" by "init", but for this description, we can consider them to be one and the same thing. Still, after writing the previous paragraph, it is my feeling that this is the first and I'm afraid only discussion group to try and not the SuSe discussion groups. In the SuSe discussion groups, they only discuss software RAID whenever they use RAID. So far I have not seen any reference to dmraid. My addition to init on initrd consists of the following statements: echo "Creating dmraid control device" # Create /dev/mapper like in /sbin/devmap_mknod.sh mkdir -p –mode=755 /dev/mapper # Create /dev/mapper/control like in /sbin/devmap_mknod.sh # with the same numbers I always see in my running system mknod –mode=600 /dev/mapper/control c 10 63 echo "Activating RAID sets" # Saw that someone else used –ignorelocking. Not documented in dmraid -h. # Eventually added –ignorelocking. dmraid -ay –ignorelocking echo "dmraid shows active RAID sets" dmraid -sa echo "dmraid shows inactive RAID sets" dmraid -si These statements are added as late as possible in the init script (after "udevstart", after modprobe sata_promise and after modprobe reiserfs(probably not necessary)), but just before the script starts to discover the root device. Then I cpio and gzip the initrd and copy it with an appropriate name to /boot. The relevant entry of /boot/grub/menu.lst looks as follows: ###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: dmraid### title SUSE LINUX 10.0 dmraid root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/mapper/pdc_dbhbgbjdgi8 vga=0x31a selinux=0 resume=/dev/mapper/pdc_dbhbgbjdgi9 splash=silent showopts initrd /initrd-2.6.13-15-smp-dmraid So, in the step-by-step approach, this is the "intermediate" situation where /boot is still on the non- RAID disk and the root (/) is on the RAID system. /boot/grub/device.map looks as follows: (fd0) /dev/fd0 (hd1) /dev/sda (hd2) /dev/sdb (hd0) /dev/hda And then I boot. The last things I see on screen during booting, using this initrd are the echos and messages from dmraid and finally, not surprising because the dmraid set is not active: Waiting for device /dev/mapper/pdc_dbhbgbjdgi8 to appear: ............... not found – exiting to /bin/sh Following this exit, you still have limited shell functionality (those functions which are on initrd). No ls. So, what I do to check: cd /dev/mapper mknod control ... (the node is already there) rm pdc* (response: no such file or directory) So the dmraid control device is there. The pdc devices are not there, but we knew that already from dmraid -si. Doing dmraid -ay at this stage also does not help, the RAID set will not activate. Before considering more drastic measures, I thought I'd try this discussion group. _______________________________________________ Ataraid-list mailing list <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:Ataraid-list@redhat.com">Ataraid-list@redhat.com</a> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ataraid-list">https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ataraid-list</a> </blockquote> </body> </html>