Initramfs does not start raid array on boot

[Chris Smart]

Greetings,

My Father's system has 3 hard drives in Linux software raid level 5, with LVM root on top.
Under Hardy x86_64 kernel 2.6.24-12-generic, this was working perfectly but subsequent updates (namely 2.6.22-14-generic and 2.6.24-15-generic) have broken this.

The problem appears to be with the initramfs, in that with the later initramfs images the raid arrays are all stopped. As they are never started, LVM volumes cannot be detected and the system cannot boot. The machine sits just there.

The arrays are not dirty - booting to 2.6.24-12-generic continues to work correctly and /proc/mdstat shows clean arrays.

I'm assuming the mdadm hook has been broken, but I haven't looked into this any further.

Cheers,
Chris

[blackiwid (s-huchler)]

I can confirm this, same problem also have root on software raid level 5 and kernel -12 works but 14 and 15 not.

boot from usb-stick (boot is there) but thats not the problem initrd loads.

[Chris Smart (csmart)]

My problem is solved - it was my own stupid fault.

I replaced /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf with an earlier copy, which had a different array configuration in it. This meant that the initramfs couldn't find the new array, because it wasn't in the config!

Whoops. Sorry Linux.

I suggest blackiwid check his config and make sure that it is indeed correct. If so, feel free to add to this bug. If not, then fix it and re-create an initramfs. Then this should be closed and never spoken of again ;)

-c

[blackiwid (s-huchler)]

k i think you can close this bug then,

i have found what was wrong here, the raid is on nvidia ide drives, so the devices was hda/hdb... but i think since a udev update the ide device-names changed to hde/hdf... is that now normal or only because its loaded by nv-sata driver?

I now normaly the mdadm.conf devices is a list of uuids but i think my bios is buggy so sometimes this uuids change so i cant use that.

but only say num-devices = x also dont work dont know why.

[blackiwid (s-huchler)]

sorry i meant it changed to sde/sdf from hda...

[linas (linasvepstas)]

Ugh./ Sure would be nice if mkinitrd at least scanned the current raid config, and put it into
/etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf so that at least initrd would be up-to-date. I personally lost a LOT
of time debugging a similar-but-different bug. -- my mdadm.conf file was blank!

After googling around, I suspect a lot of other root-raid+initrd "it won't boot" bugs might
well be just this.