After today's update to devmapper, system does not boot successfully

[Oded Arbel]

I've ran update manager today and it updated the kernel and devmapper among other packages. Now when the system starts, it fails during boot and requests the root password to go into maintenance mode. When I type in the password of the first user with admin privileges (it doesn't accept the password of any other user) the system goes into the bash command line and generate a few additional error message about missing packages (not important).

The main problem is that the files under /dev/mapper in the format of <volgroup>-<logical volume> are not block devices, but instead are symbolic links to themselves:
# ls -l /dev/mapper/system-*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2007-09-25 13:18 system-root -> system-root
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2007-09-25 13:18 system-home -> system-home
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2007-09-25 13:18 system-swap -> system-swap

mount of course fails and so does fsck, hence the maintenance mode.

The interesting thing is that apparently the root partition is mounted, even though it has the same symbolic link issue in the /dev/mapper directory. No other partitions can be mounted though.

[Robert Vollmert (rvollmert)]

I can confirm this: For me, the boot doesn't fail because I don't have any lvm-ed partition automounted (other than root), but manually mounting partitions fails ("too many levels of symbolic links"), and /dev/mapper is full of symlinks like above.

I should note that I'm running a custom self-compiled kernel (2.6.23-rc3).

[Robert Vollmert (rvollmert)]

And running the Ubuntu supplied 2.6.22-12-generic, the problem doesn't occur.

[Matti Tiainen (mvtiaine)]

I had the same problem today with dmraid devices. Removing the invalid symlinks under /dev/mapper/ and running dmsetup mknodes recreated them fine. After that I ran update-initramfs for the custom kernel and now everything works fine also after boot. Probably just updating initramfs will be enough to fix it.

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

Problem caused by self-compiled kernel, almost certainly a missing option (check our config) or wrong initramfs

[Oded Arbel (oded-geek)]

I wasn't using a self compiled kernel, but Ubuntu's generic kernel.

I want to try the latest updates, but as the computer doesn't boot I have no way to get it to fetch updates.

[Oded Arbel (oded-geek)]

It probably was a one time thing - recent updates didn't break so I don't mind closing this one.