mdadm fails to activate raid partitions in 10.04 (add_mountroot_fail_hook: not found)

[AlainKnaff]

Binary package hint: initramfs-tools

After upgrading a system with root on a raid partition from 9.04 to 10.04, initramfs fails to mount root in 2.6.32-21-generic.

When booting with an old kernel and initramfs (2.6.28-17), it works.

I get a message about add_mountroot_fail_hook: not found.
And indeed, such symbol is defined in scripts/functions in the old initramfs, but not in the new one.

Removing and re-installing the mdadm package, and rebuilding the new initramfs did not help.

However, if I specify the root fs as /dev/md4 (rather than with its UUID), and then do mdadm -A --scan on the initramfs prompt, everything works fine.

[AlainKnaff (kubuntu-misc)]

Putting the following into /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-premount/aaamdadm, and then rebuilding the initramfs seems to help:

#!/bin/sh

mdadm -A --scan

[AlainKnaff (kubuntu-misc)]

Comparing with an old (9.04) kubuntu, I noticed that /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/functions contained a definition for add_mountroot_fail_hook, whereas the same file for 10.04 no longer contains that definition.

initramfs-tools (which supplies the definition) is 0.92b in 9.04 and 0.93.2 in 10.04.

mdadm, on the other hand, is 2.6.7.1-1 in both versions.

It looks as if someone simply assumed that add_mountroot_fail_hook was no longer needed, without actually checking...

So, can we either have this back in the new initramfs-tools version, or have an updated mdadm version which no longer needs it?

[AlainKnaff (kubuntu-misc)]

After un-installing initramfs-tools (with help of --force-depends), and then re-installing it, I again got a 0.92b version (even though I am in 10.04). After removing my workaround (aaamdadm) and re-generating the initramfs (using update-initramfs), everything works fine now.

The weird thing is, now it also needed an initramfs-tools-bin package (which wasn't there before).

So what happened? Did my upgrade from 9.04 to 10.04 fail to "upgrade" initramfs-tools due to the missing initramfs-tools-bin package? But then, why is the "new" version number (0.92b) less than the old one (0.93.2)?

Or was there indeed a faulty 0.93.2 package that was later retracted, and my apt-get update's didn't pick up the retraction due to the lower version number?

Inquiring minds want to know...