Good evening all,
Long time list member, but quasi first-time poster.

I believe I screwed up my file server, it's non-operational at the moment, but 
100% recoverable, I just don't know how.

Here's my setup:

* Debian 5 on amd64
* 5x 1TB drives (mostly 7200.12's)
** all partitioned as
*** 1GB (sd*1)
*** 999GB (sd*2)
** sda1, sdb1 = software raid 1 for /boot (others sd*1 are free or swap) (md0)
** sd*2 = software raid 5 for LVM2 (md1)

I recently grew the array from 4 to 5 disks, resized my volume group, resized 
my logical volumes and accompanying FS's. Last time I had done it (3 to 4 
disks), it went fine. It worked great post reboot. However, this time, I can't 
get past an initramfs shell.

This time, I forgot to edit /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf and tell it md1 has 5 
devices, and not 4. I believe I hadn't rebooted since (a while back), and got 
caught last night when I finally did.

So, when I boot, I get stuck in an initramfs shell. The previous console 
messages are about software raid of course:

mdadm: /dev/md0 was started with 2 drives
mdadm: no devices found for /dev/md1

Wait, what?

Here's the thing, I can do this little mdadm/lvm dance leading to me being able 
to mount all my logical volumes. If memory serves me right, it went something 
like this:

mdadm --assemble --scan /dev/md1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc2 /dev/sdd2 
/dev/sde2
lvm vgchange FirstGroup -a y

At this point, /proc/mdstat says /dev/md1 is fine with all its 5 disks, lvscan 
will tell me my volumes are all active. I can mount in r/w. I took the liberty 
of editing /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf to reflect 5 instead of 4 drives, but that 
doesn't make it boot any better. Nor should it, really. The system can't even 
read mdadm.conf because it's not even mounted, so I don't see how that file has 
any effect on the issue. But perhaps there's a side effect, some background 
process that does I don't know what.

I re-read the documentation I used to grow the array 
(http://scotgate.org/2006/07/03/growing-a-raid5-array-mdadm/), and there are no 
last critical steps that sort of commit the changes survive a reboot, my 
process was the same as last time, except editing mdadm.conf.

So, there's something wrong with initrd or something of the sort.

I'm not pulling my hair out like I did last night, I know it's 100% 
recoverable, but it's just kind of annoying to have a system sit there not 
knowing what to do.

Does anyone have a clue? Reinstalling *is* a possibility, given my partition 
scheme, but would prefer not to at this point in time. I'll be googling in the 
mean time.

Thanks,
Lawrence

Sorry if this post is a little verbose, figured i'd be as clear as possible.
_______________________________________________
mlug mailing list
[email protected]
https://listes.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlug-listserv.mlug.ca

Reply via email to