disk crash

[Nabeel Moidu]

On 10/29/07, Bill Tangren <bjt at usno.navy.mil> wrote:
>
> I have a Dell Precision 670 server running RHEL ES 4 with all the updates.
> The hard disk seems to have crashed over the weekend. Here is a df output
> from last week:
>
>
> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
>                       145G   27G  111G  20% /
> /dev/sda1              99M   19M   76M  20% /boot
>
> I'm not sure (yet) exactly what kind of hard disk it is, other than it is
> a SATA drive. I'm trying to pull the procurement now. The problem is, I
> can access the boot partition, but I get a kernel panic error message
> after I choose which kernel to boot from. Regardless of which kernel I
> choose, this is what comes up:
>
> Decompressing Linux...done.
> Booting the kernel.
> Red Hat nash version 4.2.1.10 starting
>    Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
>    Found volume group "VolGroup00" using metadata type lvm2
>    2 logical volume(s) in volume group "VolGroup00" now active
>    WARNING: can't access (null)
>    exec of init ((null)) failed!!!:14
>    umount /initrd/dev failed: 2
>    Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
>
> When I boot from the rescue CD, I get this message:
>
> You don't have any Linux partitions. Press return to get the shell. The
> system will reboot when you exit from the shell.
>
> I can use fdisk to see to scsi partitions, the first, /dev/sda1, being the
> boot partition, the latter, /dev/sda2, being the rest of my OS. I can
> mount the boot partition and see its contents. I can't mount the other. I
> get this error when I try:
>
> mount: Mounting /dev/sda2 on /mnt/hd failed: Invalid argument
>
> If I try to mount the logical volume:
>
> mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/hd
>
> I get a "file not found" error. I looked in the /dev directory on the
> rescue disk, and there is no VolGroup* or LogVol* files or directories.
>
> My question, where can I go from here to diagnose the problem?
>
> TIA,
> Bill Tangren


I'd suspect some corruption in the LVM metadata. Normally in such cases, the
metadata backups automatically backed up in the /etc/lvm/backup or archive
folders are used for restoration. If you've got backups of that somewhere
else, it can be useful. Can you post the output of pvscan, vgscan and lvscan
on your system ?


-- 
Thanks and Regards
Nabeel Moidu
Doha, Qatar