Boot issue, new installation of Lenny with mirrored /boot and mirrored lvm2
Hi,
I have 2x IBM xSeries 346 servers, one has a RAID card (let's call this
machine "346a") and the other only has onboard SCSI (346b).
Both have two RAID1 software mirrors -- one for /boot (/dev/md0) and the
other for lvm2 use (/dev/md1).
Both are running the same amd64 Debian release (Lenny).
346a will boot entirely without issues whatsoever, but 346b stops at a
special initramfs sh after giving up on the lvm volume group (not found) ...
from there I can activate the md0 and md1 mirrors and activate the lvm2
logical volumes, I then exit the sh and boot continues as normal.
I've checked the kernel and module files for each machine, they are 100%
identical. I've checked all files in /boot and /boot/grub and the
differences don't give me any clues.
I've even md5 check summed every file in /boot and disassembled the
initramfs image files to compare them. Every difference seems to be
perfectly acceptable and explainable.
346a is running with 300GB SCSI drives, each set as a single drive on the
hardware (IBM) RAID controller with software RAID in use.
346b is running with 73GB SCSI drives, no RAID controller -- but using
software RAID as per 346a.
346b can have all drives / file system areas fully accessible via Ubuntu
live CD (with addition of mdadm and lvm2, plus a little setup). It is also
fully accessible using Debian rescue from the installer (netinst) disk. And
as I mentioned above, it is recoverable from the initramfs sh environment,
but it won't boot up without intervention.
I have since added "debug" to the cmdline and found that the issue is
definitely due to a failure to activate the mirrors.
<extract>
+ /scripts/local-top/mdadm
Begin: LoadingSuccess: loaded module raid1.
done.
Begin: Assembling all MD arrays ... mdadm: No devices listed in conf file
were found.
Failure: failed to assemble all arrays.
done.
</extract>
Inside the initramfs file system, the /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf file looks
fine -- it includes the correct details including the UUID of each mirror.
Kind Regards
AndrewM
Andrew McGlashan
Broadband Solutions now including VoIP
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