Uptate: F11 x86_64 problems -- my disks are getting locked out

[Rich Mahn]

> On Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:15:58 -0400
> Rich Mahn <rich at lat.com> wrote:
> 
> > I did a clean install of F11 x86_64 on a system that also has F10
> > i686, F8, and others for a multi-boot situation.  F11 is working
> > fairly well except for one problem.  I can't mount one of my disks.

> snip

> > Does anybody have any ideas what might be causing this and how to fix
> > it?
> > 

> Run blkid as root and make sure all your disks have the correct UUID
> in /etc/fstab.  You should be mounting them using UUID instead of
> device name or label.

Thanks for telling me about blkid.  A real useful tool.

> Here is a sample from my fstab:

> #/dev/sda1
> UUID=c6e94dd5-0cc3-4940-ac15-cb0ea856fd9a /boot ext3 defaults  1 2 
> #/dev/sda5 
> UUID=c94b5547-e098-45ca-8776-cce0e0cd6bac / ext4 defaults      1 1

> Maybe you are already doing this. 

> Compare the F10 and F11 /etc/fstab for these disks.  Make sure the
> mount points are unique.

> You could check for bugs like this in bugzilla.

> http://bugzilla.redhat.com

Since I mount these drives manually, it's not the fstab--at least
I don't think it is.

I suspect udev or something like that.  The kernel recognizes
the disks and paritions okay, but the device nodes for the partitions
are never created.  They can be forced by appropriate fdisk/hdparm
or whatever that re-reads the label.  But even then you can't mount
them.  You can, however, dumpe2fs, dd, and many other useful things.

I think I started to run parted on the disk and aborted when I noticed
I had used the wrong disk.  In the current state, F10 is fine and F11
isn't.  I tried to install F11 i686 to see if it was an X86_64 problem,
but now I can't install F11.  It crashes when it tries to find disks.
It looks like maybe it thinks the disk in question is part of a raid
or something.

I can get rid of the problem by zeroing the disk.  I'm going to see if
I can create the problem with parted.

Rich