dmraid doesn't activate devices on boot

[Thomas Jackowski]

Hey,

I have a fakeraid (as known as softwareraid) on my mainboard. It is a AMD SB850 and Linux says:

$ sudo dmraid -r
/dev/sdd: pdc, "pdc_cficbgcda-1", stripe, ok, 1953124992 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sda: pdc, "pdc_cficbgcda-0", stripe, ok, 1953124992 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sdc: pdc, "pdc_cficbgcda-1", stripe, ok, 1953124992 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sdb: pdc, "pdc_cficbgcda-0", stripe, ok, 1953124992 sectors, data@ 0

$ sudo dmraid -l
...(cut)...
pdc : Promise FastTrack (S,0,1,10)
...(cut)...

Well I created a RAID 10 array in the raid bios and managed somehow to install mint 10 (was a little bit tricky, due the installer doesn't show the right devices).

Well after everything was installed I rebooted and the system hang after /scripts/local-top (dropped to busybox). Further investigation showed that /scripts/init-top/dmraid calls /sbin/dmraid-activate to activate devices. And at this point something is somehow broken.
To fix this problem fast I added "dmraid -ay" at the bottom of the script so it did the trick for me but somebody should look deeper in to this.

Let me know if I can help you somehow.

Thanks,
Thomas

[Thomas Jackowski (mint-bugs)]

Sidenote: See https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/644742 for installer bug.

[Justin Krehel (jkrehel)]

Hello Thomas,

Thanks for reporting this. We don't apply anything to dmraid so I'm guessing this is also an upstream issue as well. Have you tried it recently with similar results or have you moved on?

Thanks for your feedback, looking forward to hearing from you.

[Thomas Jackowski (mint-bugs)]

Hi,

it seems that there is a bug in dmraid where the metadata is not recognized correctly from software raids created by AMD SB850 controller. I contacted Heinz Mauelshagen via dmraid mailinglist, but there hasn't been any response to this yet (though another "victim" responded). Also there is no solution for this (except you will stick with Windows).

So I'm still using the workaround.

Thanks,
Thomas

[Don Fletcher (fotofletcher)]

I had a similar issue in Linux Mint 10 -- My data drives are RAID 5, this is and NVidia chipset MB from MSI.

The funny thing about it, all of my mounts fail on boot -- sayd the device is missing or not ready -- if I skip the mounting, after I login, if I just run gparted (parted doesn't do it) open and close it, it fully activates the raid, and I can mount my volumes.

[Ray Bittner (rbittner7)]

I have encountered the same problem with Linux Mint 17 as well as Linux Mint Debian Edition, and I have found the bugs and tested a solution. There are two problems/bugs involved:

Bug #1: The /sbin/dmraid-activate script relies on grep, which is not included in initramfs by default. It is strange, because the dmraid hook located at /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/dmraid has a conditional inclusion for grep, as in:

 if [ "$BUSYBOX" = n ]; then
  copy_exec /bin/grep bin
 fi

But as you can see, it will only include grep if busy box is not present. By including grep unconditionally, the dmraid hook will ensure that grep is included in initramfs after you rebuild initramfs as root using:

update-initramfs -u

Bug #2: The /sbin/dmraid-activate expects to be passed the possible RAID devices using the form:

sda
sdb
sdc

The current script automatically pre-pends /dev/ to these so that they become /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc.

However, the script is actually passed device names of the form:

/dev/sda
/dev/sdb
/dev/sdc

So when the script pre-pends an extra /dev it tries to process a $Node_Name of:

/dev/dev/sda
/dev/dev/sdb
/dev/dev/sdc

Which fails. Either the script calling dmraid-activate should be changed, or the /sbin/dmraid-activate script itself should be changed, in order to create the proper device path names. I have attached a modified /sbin/dmraid-activate script as an example with the appropriate changes made. Search for $Node_Name in the file to see these. Running this as root will cause the modified script to be included in initramfs and along with the fix for Bug #1, your boot should proceed normally:

update-initramfs -u