FC5 booting off 3ware boot volume on a 5TB disk array (panics mounting rootfs)

Clem Taylor clem.taylor at gmail.com
Thu Aug 10 18:39:11 UTC 2006


Hi,

I'm trying to bring up FC5 on a new system with a 3ware 9550SX and 8
750GB drives. I only have drives connected to the 3ware controller, so
I need to be able to boot off the array.

FC5 seemed to install okay, but it turns out that the ~5TB data
partition was unmountable. The disk had a msdos disk label so the 5TB
partition wouldn't work. It sounded like grub can't boot off a GPT
labeled disk, so I decided to try out 3ware's new 'boot volume'
feature. I created a 5TB volume with a 32GB subvolume for boot. The
boot volume shows up as /dev/sda and the make data volume shows up as
/dev/sdb. I installed FC5 on this configuration and things seemed to
install okay, but on reboot the kernel panics, unable to find the
root: "VFS: Unable to mount rootfs on unknown_block(0,0)"

I have sda parititoned like this:
sda1  125MB boot (ext3)
sda2  1874MB swap
sda3  30GB / (xfs)

grub.conf is booting the kernel with root=/dev/sda3

If I boot from a rescue CD, it finds the root volume just fine and
everything seems happy.

I've used the XFS '/' on other systems and I have booted from a 3ware
without problems, (worked just fine in the initial install on this
machine) but this is the first time I have tried the boot volume
feature.

Any ideas what I might try?

                              --Clem




More information about the fedora-list mailing list