[vmware 6.5] rescue: fails to find partitions

[Chris Cheney]

Ubuntu 8.10 RC - 20081022 - Ubuntu alternate i386 cd

It fails with a red screen with message failing step is: "Enter rescue mode".

After talking with cjwatson 'list-devices partition' outputs nothing as well.

The 'hardware' is VMware 6.5 on the emulated LSI Logic controller.

Chris

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Colin mentioned this appears to occur since there is no ID_TYPE information.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Well, one of the SCSI inquiry commands is definitely failing, but unfortunately I don't think I can tell which or how from an strace. Scott, is this likely to be a problem in udev or the kernel? scsi_serial.c is non-trivial enough that I wasn't sure.

This is specific either to Chris' test setup (VMware 6.5) or to the device it's emulating. I've confirmed that rescue works fine for me in KVM even with encrypted LVM (basically the toughest case).

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

Identified as a missing ID_TYPE caused by scsi_id not returning, due to lack of support for the SG ioctl set in the VMware driver.

Previous versions of scsi_id fell back to setting stuff from sysfs, but this is all in the kernel environment now, so current version doesn't.

Best solution is a rule to ensure that ID_TYPE is still set for backwards compatibility for the time being

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Fix is in the queue for post-RC, thanks to Scott.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package udev - 124-7

---------------
udev (124-7) intrepid; urgency=low

  * debian/rules.d/65-id-type.rules:
    - Ensure that ID_TYPE is set to "disk" for block devices that are
      likely disks, or "cd" for those that are likely CDs. In some cases
      this has been lost in favour of $DEVTYPE, but many things (including
      our installer) haven't caught up. LP: #287807.

 -- Scott James Remnant <email address hidden> Thu, 23 Oct 2008 02:09:43 +0100