In afterthought, I think the header should be non-common, rahter than non-standard…

Hi all.

I have passed through this forum yesterday, searching for a possible cause for a problem I have had.
The theme was almost well known – after upgrade from 6.06 to 6.10 the system won’t boot. Lilo (I use Lilo, not Grub) would load the kernel, and after a while, never reachine "init" the system would wait for something, I didn’t know what.

I tried disconnecting USB, setting different boot parameters, even virified (using the kernel messages) that disks didn’t replace their locations (and they did not, although I have additional IDE controller). Alas, it didn’t seem good.

The weird thing is that the during this wait (there was keyboard response, but the system didn’t move on…), the disk LED flashed in a fixed rate. I though it might have to do with RAID rebuild, however, from live-cd, there was no signs of such a case.

Then, on one of the "live-cd" boots, accessing the system via "chroot" again, I have decied to open the initrd used by the system, in an effort to dig into the problem.
Using the following set of commands did it:
cp /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-10-generic /tmp/initrd.gz
cd /tmp && mkdir initrd.out && cd initrd.out
gzip -dc ../initrd.gz | cpio -od

Following this, I’ve had the initrd image extracted, and I could look into it. Just to be on the safe side, I have looked into the image’s /etc, and found there mdadm/mdadm.conf file.
This file had different (wrong!) UUIDs for my software RAID setup (compared with "mdadm –detail /dev/md0" for md0, etc).
I have located the origin of this file to be the system’s real /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf, which was originated a while ago, before I’ve made many manual modifications (changed disks, destroyed some of the md devices, etc). I have fixed the system’s real /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf file to reflect the correct system, and recreated the initrd.img file for the system (now with the up-to-date mdadm.conf). Updated Lilo, and the system was able to boot correctly this time.

The funny thing is that even using the previous kernel, which had its initrd.img built long ago, and which worked fine for a long while failed to complete the boot process altogether using the upgraded system.

My system relevant details:

/dev/hda+/dev/hdc -> /dev/md2 (/boot), /dev/md3

/dev/hde+/dev/hdg -> /dev/md1
/dev/md1+/dev/md1 -> LVM2, including the / on it

Lilo is installed on /dev/hda and /dev/hdc altogether.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.