I tried installing Debian 3.1 on my HP A500 with software RAID1 enabled for /, /boot, and /var but the install failed. So, I decided to do it the old fashioned way and install the system, create degraded RAID sets, then copy the system over, and reboot (a la the RAID 1 Root HOWTO http://www.parisc-linux.org/faq/raidboot-howto.html). Everything looked okay (all the devices were found properly) until the kernel paniced when it tried to "pivot_root".
Through my online research, the error "pivot_root: no such file or directory" is caused when the system is ready to get off of the initrd image and actually start using the disk but it can't find the directory /initrd. I'm assuming it can't find the directory because it's not properly finding/reading my RAID 1 set. I went back and looked at the initrd image and saw that it did have the md and raid1 kernel modules in the proper directory. I didn't see anywhere that they'd been loaded, though, so I updated /etc/mkinitrd/modules to list md and raid1 and built a new initrd image. After rebooting, I saw that md had started and raid1 registered itself, but still got a kernel panic. Does anyone know why my RAID 1 sets wouldn't be seen by the initial startup of Linux? I can boot just fine on a normal disk with the stock 2.6 kernel that comes with Debian 3.1. When I try to boot from a RAID 1 device with the same kernel and everything, it panics. Also, I don't know if this means anything or not, but when I boot from the normal SCSI disk (without RAID), everything boots without user intervention. When I try to boot from the RAID drive, I get the prompt asking if I want to change any of the boot parameters or to press "b" to boot with the defaults. -- PC Drew
