James Allsopp wrote: > I have a debian machine which was on for a long time (~months). Just moved > house and rebooted and now it doesn't boot. Bummer. > My 4 harddrives are organised in pairs of RAID 1 (Mirrored) with LVM > spanning them. Originally there was just one pair, but then I got two new > hard drives and added them. I then increased the space of VolGroup-LogVol03 > to cover these new drives and increase the space of Home (/ wass on one of > the other logical volume groups). This all worked fine for ages. Sounds fine. Assuming that it booted after those changes. > When I boot all four drives are detected in BIOS and I've check all the > connections. Good. > It gets to "3 logical volumes in volume group "VolGroup" now active" which > sounds good. That does sound good. > Then here's the error: > "fsck.ext4: No such file or directory while trying to open > /dev/mapper/VolGroup-LogVol03 > /dev/mapper/VolGroup-LogVol03: > The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 > ........." Hmm... I am not familiar with that error. But searching the web found several stories about it. Most concerned recent changes to the system that prevented it from booting. > I have a debian machine which was on for a long time (~months). Just > moved house and rebooted and now it doesn't boot. > > My 4 harddrives are organised in pairs of RAID 1 (Mirrored) with LVM > spanning them. Originally there was just one pair, but then I got two > new hard drives and added them. I then increased the space of > VolGroup-LogVol03 to cover these new drives and increase the space of > Home (/ wass on one of the other logical volume groups). This all > worked fine for ages. And you rebooted in that time period? Otherwise these changes, if not done completely correct, seem prime to have triggered your current problem independent of any other action. You say it was on for a long time. If you had not rebooted in that long time then this may have been a hang-fire problem for all of that time. > I'm wondering if some of the drive id's have been switched. If you mean the drive UUIDs then no those would not have changed. > Any help would be really appreciated. I'm worried I've lost all my data on > home First, do not despair. You should be able to get your system working again. You are probably simply missing the extra raid pair configuration. I strongly recommend using the debian-installer rescue mode to gain control of your system again. It works well and is readily available. Use a standard Debian installation disk. Usually we recommend the netinst disk because it is the smallest image. But any of the netinst or CD#1 or DVD#1 images will work fine for rescue mode since it is not actually installing but booting your system at that point so the difference between them does not matter. You have a disk? Go fish it out and boot it. Here is the official documentation for it: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch08s07.html.en But that is fairly terse. Let me say that the rescue mode looks just like the install mode initially. It will ask your keyboard and locale questions and you might wonder if you are rescuing or installing! But it will have "Rescue" in the upper left corner so that you can tell that you are not in install mode and be assured. Get the tool set up with keyboard, locale, timezone, and similar and eventually it will give you a menu with a list of actions. Here is a quick run-through. Advanced options... Rescue mode keyboard dialog ...starts networking... hostname dialog domainname dialog ...apt update release files... ...loading additional components, Retrieving udebs... ...detecting disks... Then eventually it will get to a menu "Enter rescue mode" that will ask what device to use as a root file system. It will list the partitions that it has automatically detected. If you have used a RAID then one of the menu entry items near the bottom will be "Assemble RAID array" and you should assemble the raid at that point. That will bring up the next dialog menu asking for partitions to assemble. Select the appropriate for your system. Then continue. Since you have two RAID configurations I think you will need to do this twice. Once for each. I believe that you won't be able to use the automatically select partitions option but not sure. In any case get both raid arrays up and online at this step before proceeding. At that point it presents a menu "Execute a shell in /dev/...". That should get you a shell on your system with the root partition mounted. It is a /bin/sh shell. I usually at that point start bash so as to have bash command line recall and editing. Then mount all of the additional disks. # /bin/bash root@hostname:~# mount -a At that point you have a root superuser shell on the system and can make system changes. After doing what needs doing you can reboot to the system. Remove the Debian install media and boot to the normal system and see if the changes were able to fix the problem. Now what is your original problem? I think (not sure) you have added a second raid pair but have not propagated the changes completely through the boot system. Basically make sure that mdadm.conf is updated correctly and rebuild the initramfs to make sure that it includes it. /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-$(uname -r) Here are some previous messages on this topic. https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2013/01/msg00195.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2013/01/msg00392.html Start by getting your system booted using rescue mode and then work through the problems of the raid arrays not being assembled at boot time. Come back here and report your progress. Bob
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