trouble booting system with I2O hardware RAID

[Craig White]

On Mon, 2005-04-11 at 11:23 -0500, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
> This problem is from CentOS 4 (an RHEL 4 clone).  I'm sending this email 
> to Fedora mailing list too, since I found references for exactly the 
> same problem on Fedora Core 3, and am hoping that somebody might have a 
> solution (plus it might save some grief to some Fedora user who runs 
> into same problem in the future, so I see potential benefit of 
> discussing the problem on Fedora mailing list too).  In all probability, 
> if I attempted to install Fedora Core onto that machine, I would run 
> into the exact same problem.
> 
> Basically, install process seems to go fine, however the machine doesn't 
> wan't to boot after it.
> 
> The system in question has one of I2O Adaptec RAID controllers.  I've 
> configured LVM with one volume group and several volumes.  If I boot 
> into the rescue mode, all looks fine and dandy.  Anaconda finds the 
> installation, and I can access all volumes.
> 
> However, when doing "real" boot, it gets into trouble.  All required 
> modules are loaded from initrd image (as far as I can tell).  The I2O 
> modules are able to locate the RAID devices (I see all partitions 
> reported: /dev/i2o/hda1 (empty, unused), /dev/i2o/hdb1 (/boot), and 
> /dev/i2o/hdb2 (rest of the system under LVM).  The only thing different 
> from rescue mode is that i2o/hda and i2o/hdb are reversed (this is 
> strange, but it shouldn't affect things since /boot partition has a 
> label "/boot", and all the rest is under LVM, so everything should be 
> device name independent).  I have no idea why i2o device drivers are 
> detecting volumes in different order when loaded from initrd image 
> during boot, and by Anaconda during installation.
> 
> The last couple of messages printed on the screen are:
> 
> Creating root device
> Mounting root file system
> kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
> EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
> mount: error 2 mounting none
> Switching to new root
> WARNING: can't access (null)
> exec of init ((null)) failed!!!: 14
> umount /initrd/dev failed: 2
> Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
> 
> Looking at the "init" script from initrd image, this correspond to:
> 
> echo Mounting root filesystem
> mount -o defaults --ro -t ext3 /dev/root /sysroot
> mount -t tmpfs --bind /dev /sysroot/dev
> echo Switching to new root
> switchroot /sysroot
> umount /initrd/dev
> 
> Which would indicate that mount of root file system went OK, but then it 
> failed to mount /dev filesystem (basically, move already mounted /dev to 
> /sysroot/dev).  After the switchroot /sysroot, old /dev mount point 
> become invalid (non-accessible), the new /dev mount point was not there 
> and of course everything broke from that point on.
> 
> I've Googled around a bit, and the only relevant thing Google gave me 
> was this French page.  There were couple of more pages (some from 
> archives of Fedora/RH mailing lists) with similar but different problem 
> (modules failing to load and/or detect disk drives, which is not the 
> case here, all modules were loaded correctly as witnessed by successfull 
> LVM initialization and successfull root file system mount).
> 
> http://www.fedora-france.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=3838&forum=6&post_id=20970
> 
> I do live in Canada, but don't speak a word of French (shame on me, but 
> in my defense it is on my todo list).  However I did managed to figure 
> out somebody suggested going with Grub instead of LILO.  IMO, Grub or 
> LILO shouldn't make any difference, since the error is happening way 
> after boot loader did its job.  Anyhow, just for fun, I reinstalled the 
> system from scratch, this time choosing Grub as boot loader of choice to 
> be installed into MBR.  However, for whatever reason, Anaconda did not 
> install Grub (dd & less showed no signs of Grub in MBR).  Boot into the 
> rescue, chroot, grub-install, OK now I have Grub in MBR.  But again, no 
> joy.  Grub doesn't even start and system simply hangs in mid-air.  No 
> errors printed, no anything.
> 
> Currently, I'm kind of stuck and idea-less.  The system did worked 
> perfectly in the past with Red Hat 7.3 (and LILO as boot loader), and 
> exactly the same hardware RAID configuration (two volumes, one for 
> system, one for data).  Any help, hint, etc would be greatly appriciated.
---
bugzilla ?

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=141657

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=153760

Craig