LVM no longer works

[Greg Schneider]

Binary package hint: lvm2

I'm running Feisty, and lvm2 and lvm-common were updated to 2.02.06-2ubuntu9 and 1.5.20ubuntu12 respectively this week.

Since then, the system has just been hanging in the boot process when it comes to loading LVM. I've let it sit there for 5-10 mins and nothing happens. Hitting ctrl alt del lets it bypass loading LVM, but then I have to mount all drives manually, nothing is automounted.

Worked perfectly prior to the latest upgrade.

[Matti Lindell (mlind)]

This looks like a dupe of #102864.
Have you tried if booting works with/without evms package?

[Ralph Janke (txwikinger)]

Thanks for reporting this.

Could you please remove the evms package and check if the problem stll exists after that.

Thanks

[Greg Schneider (greg-schneider)]

Hello,

Removed the evms package and ran the initramfs update as well.

Now it seems that it is totally broken. Cannot boot into either the -13 or -14 kernel. It hangs after mdadm: No arrays found in config file or manually. This usually appears during the boot sequence, so it shouldn't be a problem. (I have a few SATA drives, but not in RAID).

Another thing I had to do previously to get it to boot is add sleep 10 to the init file of initramfs. However, that shouldn't be related to this issue.

[Greg Schneider (greg-schneider)]

OK, after it hangs for a while, it drops down to the initramfs shell. Here's the error output:

Check root = bootarg cat /proc/cmdline or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules ls /dev
ALERT! /dev/evms/sda4 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

[Greg Schneider (greg-schneider)]

OK, after it hangs for a while, it drops down to the initramfs shell. Here's the error output:

Check root = bootarg cat /proc/cmdline or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules ls /dev
ALERT! /dev/evms/sda4 does not exist. Dropping to a shell! I would tend to think that this is happening because I removed evms.

[Greg Schneider (greg-schneider)]

I readded evms and it will boot, but you have to do ctrl alt del at the LVM loading stage as it just hangs, and none of my drives are automounted as a result.

Here is output from when I installed evms and initramfs update ran:

cp: cannot stat `/etc/udev/rules.d/25-dmsetup.rules': No such file or directory
W: mdadm: unchecked configuration file: /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
W: mdadm: please read /usr/share/doc/mdadm/README.upgrading-2.5.3.gz .
W: mkconf: MD subsystem is not loaded, thus I cannot scan for arrays.
W: mdadm: failed to auto-generate temporary mdadm.conf file.
W: mdadm: no configuration file available.
W: mdadm: falling back to emergency procedure in initramfs.

And on boot, I got the following advisory:

(something like this) add_to_rules: do not reference parent sysfs directories directly, this may break with future kernels, fix in /etc/udev/rules.d/19-local.rules:1

[Greg Schneider (greg-schneider)]

Ok, I fixed it.

I kept evms, but noticed that in my menu.lst file the entries had /dev/evms/sdx in the path. Removed evms from that and it boots fine now.

However, my drives (apart from /) are still not automounting, and they are properly declared in fstab.

[Scott James Remnant (Canonical) (canonical-scott)]

Attach your /etc/fstab

[Greg Schneider (greg-schneider)]

Here..

[Ralph Janke (txwikinger)]

They are not automounting because they are commented out. Can you remove the # in front of the lines which you want to mount and try it again?

Thanks

[Craig Box (craig.box)]

I have the same problem and have found a solution. I'd set "KERNEL=="dm-[0-9]*", OPTIONS+="ignore_device"" in /etc/udev/rules.d/20-names.rules for a previous workaround. Remove it, and it boots fine. Do you have this set anywhere? It was the workaround for bug 38409, before it was fixed.

[Ralph Janke (txwikinger)]

Confirmed due to multiple reports.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for lvm2 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]