After having copied a OpenSuse 10.2 system with software-raid (
disk-mirror with 2 IDE harddisks) to a different set of harddisks,
Linux can no longer boot on the new disks, when I boot with the
standard Open SuSE 10.2 kernel.
The error message is from MD saying that it can not find any devices
for my three raid partions /dev/md0 (swap) , /dev/md1 (/) and /dev/md2
(/home)
md: No device found for /dev/md0...
and the boot sequence halts.
The strange thing is that if I boot the system with a standard Linux
2.6.19.1 kernel, also on the harddisk (no module support), or if I
connect the harddisk to a MS Virtual PC, it boots just fine. The
problem has apparently something to do with the OpenSuSE 10.2 std
kernel. If I boot the rescue system from the dvd, it also looks just
fine ! (cat /dev/mdstat).
On the harddisk where the system was originally copied from, it works
perfectly.
To see if I could locate what actually made the system unbootable with
the std. SuSE kernel,
I made a completely new installation, moving the data from the old
system to the new, step
by step.
First I made a new SuSE installation on a new harddisk with the same
raid partitions md0,
md1 and md2. Then I booted the recover system and copied all directories
except /boot and
/etc/mdadm.conf. When booting the new system, everything worked fine.
I then installed the 2.6.19 kernel and edited the /boot/grub/menu.lst
accordingly. and booted
again. Still working ok.
OK it must be the /boot files I thought, and to confirm this c I copied
the old /boot to see if
that was the case. But when booting, both kernels still worked !!?.
When booting the 2.6.19.1 vanilla linux kernel, it uses some kind of
autodetect to find
matching raid partitions and complains about different UUID's on the
raid partitions, but that's
probably because the kernel is compiled without module support, and does
therefore, at that
time, don't have access to /etc/mdadm.conf. It matches the /dev/hdax
names with the
/dev/mdx device correctly though, so I presume it's no big deal.
Maybe the explanation has something to do with low level md driver
problems when running
two different versions of the kernel. I remember that I, at some point,
had used mdadm on the
2.6.19.1 kernel when rearranging some of the /dev/mdx devices, after the
md autodetect
mounted the /dev/hda1 to md3 and not md0. Maybe the reason for my
problem is that the
newer md drivers in 2.6.19.1 does things to the md-drives that is
incompatible with the older
SuSE 10.2 standard 2.6.18-34 kernel.
/Bo
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