Greetings SL fans, Sorry for the length of this post, but I'm hoping someone can come to my rescue and want to provide sufficient context.
Recently I had a hard drive failure on a Sun X4600 box running SL4.8. The box has four drives; the drive that failed was /boot (only). The other three drives make up /dev/md0. The /boot drive was not backed up (headsmack!). I have created a rescue USB stick based on the System Rescue CD, which boots via grub. I can boot the System Rescue CD successfully, and it sees /dev/md0, which I can then mount and read from and write to. I have attempted to create a kernel and initrd image to add to the USB stick that will boot the box as if the kernel and initrd image were on the failed (and now removed) boot drive. I built the kernel and initrd image on a box similar to the box with the failed hard drive. I replaced /etc/modprobe.conf with the file from the target server, and then did 'yum install kernel-largesmp'. I copied all the resulting kernel-related files from /boot to the USB stick, as well as the appropriate directory from /lib/modules. I then restored the helper box to its original state. I booted the System Rescue CD on the target system and copied the /lib/modules directory into place on /dev/md0. I fixed up grub/menu.lst to have a stanza to boot the newly created SL4 kernel. I rebooted the box, and everything seemed to be going swimmingly, until . . . . . . the booted kernel seems unable to build /dev/md0 and the boot process fails. In the original configuration, the boot drive was /dev/sda, and the drives making up the soft RAID partition were /dev/sdb, dev/sdc, and /dev/sdd. The System Rescue CD detects the USB stick as /dev/sda and the three SAS drives as sdb, sdc, and sdd. All is well. It's not clear to me what is going awry with the SL kernel, but as the boot verbiage scrolls by, I see /dev/sdc referenced twice, and no reference to /dev/sdd. When the kernel attempts to assemble /dev/md0, it uses /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, and /dev/sdc and this fails and /dev/md0 cannot be mounted and the kernel panics. Help, please. Suggestions? Thanks. BTW, I've put both SL4.8 Disc One, and the SL4.8 Live CD on a bootable USB stick; both boot successfully, but I was unable to find a way to make either one recognize /dev/md0, much less "rescue" me. Cheers, Pann -- Pann McCuaig <[email protected]> 212-854-8689 Systems Coordinator, Economics Department, Columbia University Department Computing Resources: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/economics/computing/
