On 8/26/06, Aaron Gifford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote (or in other words, I wrote):
No matter what I tried, booting always failed at the point of mounting the root filesystem. I would be kicked to a "mountroot>" prompt. Any attempts at mounting root from ufs:/dev/gvinum/root failed. Even if I loaded geom_vinum.ko by hand during boot to be absolutely sure gvinum was loaded, this failed. At "mountroot>", the gvinum devices did not show up at all. So I fell back and mounted /dev/ad0a (my old non-gvinum drive) as root. That worked. kldstat showed that indeed geom_vinum.ko WAS successfully loaded. But when I looked in /dev nothing for gvinum showed up there. It was empty. The "gvinum list" command showed all my gvinum volumes working, but there were NO entries in /dev. No wonder I was unable to mount /dev/gvinum/root -- There was no device entry. So what's the deal? Any suggestions? Is there something I need to compile in my kernel?
I managed to fix my own problem. Before I posted, I did some searching and found previous posts of people who were missing /dev/gvinum device entries. They mentioned that it was corrupt GEOM vinum metadata. I did not believe that this applied to my situation, as while booted of my older working i386 kernel running on a non-GEOM-vinum drive, the GEOM vinum volumes appeared and worked normally. Therefore, I concluded, the metadata must be in working order. However, no matter how I tried to boot off the amd64 kernel on the gvinum root volume, it failed. Closer examination made it look like perhaps under the amd64 kernel and geom_vinum.ko module, perhaps the metadata stored in the first 265 sectors (512-byte sectors) of the vinum partitions was being interpreted differently than it was by the i386 kernel and geom_vinum.ko module. This leads me to believe that the problem was one of the following: 1) Due to my changing the BIOS boot order of my drives (so as to boot from the gvinum drive running amd64 instead of the non-vinum i386 kernel drive), perhaps GEOM vinum got confused about the configuration since the BIOS device boot order was different; or 2) because of differences between the i386 and amd64 architectures, GEOM vinum volumes created under one architecture do not correctly appear under another architecture. If #1, then I need to remember this and be careful about changing BIOS boot order while running GEOM vinu. If #2, then I believe this is a bug in GEOM vinum. Volume metadata should be cross-architecture independent. So, FreeBSD gurus wiser in the innards of GEOM vinum than this user (pretty much everyone who knows how GEOM vinum actually works), which is the cause of my woes? Is it #1? Or is it #2? Or am I missing a third possibility entirely? Thanks for any future enlightenment! Aaron out. _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"