fsck failure at boot

[Herta Van den Eynde]

Well, the relevance of SANsurfer would depend on what the problem is. 
When groping in the dark, it'd be one of the places I'd look for 
indications.  But upon re-reading your initial post, I agree that 
chances are slim that the HBA is the root cause of your problem.

You mentioned RHAS4.  Are you using a standard Red Hat kernel, or did 
you built your own?  (Reason I ask is that I want to exclude an initial 
ram disk that doesn't know about your QLogic HBA.)

I'm a bit confused by the "*** An error occurred during the file system 
check" error message you mentioned in your first mail.  I expect that to 
be generated by /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit, not by fsck.ext3.  (Might be a 
cut-n-paste to the wrong portion of the mail body?)  Note that there are 
two locations in that script that can generate that error: once while 
the root filesystem is mounted read-only, and again after lvm2 
initialization.

The complaint about the superblock problem can be ignored, in as far as 
the superblock must be correct - as is evident from the fact that you 
can mount the partition just fine when the system is fully booted.
(Assuming that /dev/sdl1 doesn exist, a "fsck.ext3 -a /dev/sdl1" will 
generate the same error.)
But combined with the error "fsck.ext3: No such file or directory while 
trying to open /dev/sdb1", it looks like the device special filename 
/dev/sdb1 hasn't been created yet at the time you're trying to use it.

Do dmesg or /var/log/messages contain additional information?

Is this a system you can take down for testing?  If so, could you
- edit rc.sysinit to slightly change one of the two "*** An error 
occurred during the file system check" error messages, to determine 
which of the two locations actually causes the error?
- reboot again, and when you're dropped to the shell,
   - manually check whether the device special file
     /dev/sdb1 exists or not
   - manually execute the checks in rc.sysinit prior
     to the error message to determine which one fails

Kind regards,

Herta

Jason Dixon wrote:
> On Apr 21, 2006, at 10:48 AM, Herta Van den Eynde wrote:
> 
>> Jason,
>>
>> Do you still have the command (and command output) you used to  create 
>> the filesystem?
> 
> 
> fsck /dev/sdb
> ( deleted old partition, created new partition, wrote and exited)
> 
> mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
> 
> mkdir /san
> 
> mount -text3 /dev/sdb1 /san
> 
>> Does SANsurfer report any errors?
> 
> 
> Not using it, not really relevant that I can see.  Again, the LUN  works 
> fine when mounted.  The OS is simply failing to mount it from  fstab 
> during boot.  (mount -a works fine afterwards)
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -- 
> Jason Dixon
> DixonGroup Consulting
> http://www.dixongroup.net

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