I recently tried a badly needed kernel upgrade on my desktop system,
moving from kernel 2.6.23-gentoo-r3 to kernel 2.6.29-gentoo-r5.  This
also required an upgrade of udev from 141 to 151-r4.  When I rebooted
the box there was no /dev/hda4 which is normally the root filesystem,
and instead what was the root filesystem had a device name of, I
believe, "rootfs" in the kernel mount table which had the same files.  A
number of other mounts were gone as well (there was no /dev/hda at all,
which has several partitions).

The boot-up stumbled to a halt at a maintenance mode prompt with the
root filesystem mounted R/O and of course no gnome desktop.  I could use
mount -o remount,rw / to make the root filesystem RW, which allowed me
to re-emerge an earlier version of udev and boot to the previous kernel,
but I'm stuck with an aging kernel, and other tools depend on a kernel
and udev upgrade so sooner or later I'm going to be just, plain,
stuck :(

The drive setup is a bit complex.  The actual hard drive mounting
(excluding things like proc, udev, devpts, etc.) look like:

/dev/hda4 on / type reiserfs (rw,noatime)
/dev/mapper/main_vg-fmouse on /home/fmouse type reiserfs (rw,noatime,notail)
/dev/hda1 on /home/fmouse/win98 type reiserfs (rw,noatime,notail)
/dev/mapper/main_vg-win_xp on /home/fmouse/winxp type reiserfs 
(rw,noatime,notail)
/dev/mapper/main_vg-backup on /home/fmouse/winxp2 type ext3 (rw,noatime)
/dev/mapper/main_vg-archive on /home/fmouse/archive type reiserfs 
(rw,noatime,notail)
/dev/hda2 on /boot type ext3 (rw,noatime)

The /dev/mapper/main_vg-* block devices are LVM logical volumes
consisting of Linux RAID-1 arrays which contain an archive and a couple
of filesystems for a VMware installation.  The underlying drives are
SATA drives which show up as /dev/sd[a-d]1 in /dev.

This setup must be maintained in a functional state across any kernel
and udev upgrades.

I've been careful to use the .config from the working kernel as the
start for configuring a kernel for the newer kernel, using make
oldconfig.

Does anyone have any idea what's wrong here?  Am I required in recent
kernels to identify all physical drives in /etc/fstab (and anywhere else
it matters) with a UUID instead of a /dev device name?  I've wasted an
entire day on this problem, which I can ill afford, but I have to get
past this roadblock and get my kernel up-to-date.

-- 
Lindsay Haisley       | "In an open world,    |     PGP public key
FMP Computer Services |    who needs Windows  |      available at
512-259-1190          |      or Gates"        | http://pubkeys.fmp.com
http://www.fmp.com    |                       |


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