[PLUG] booting from RAID1 problems

[Russell Senior]

>>>>> "Russell" == Russell Senior <russell at personaltelco.net> writes:

Russell> I have a debian box (v7.11, says /etc/debian_version) that is
Russell> built on top of a RAID1 array, including the root filesystem.
Russell> It has been perking along pretty reliably for years.  Recently
Russell> there was a problem with the motherboard (it doesn't power-up
Russell> anymore, tried replacing the power supply, still nothing).  So,
Russell> I ran down to Free Geek and grabbed one of their $100 Dell Core
Russell> 2 Due boxes and plugged the two SATA hard disks into the Dell,
Russell> so far so good.  But it is having trouble finding the arrays
Russell> and therefore can't find the root filesystem.  I also get a
Russell> busybox error that says: "/bin/sh: can't access tty; job
Russell> control turned off" and I get an unresponsive prompt:
Russell> "(initramfs)"

Russell> It seems like it ought to work, since the disks are the same,
Russell> all the configuration should be self-contained.  I get a grub
Russell> menu, so it's reading the disk.  I've tried modifying the
Russell> kernel commandline within grub to use /dev/md0 as the rootfs
Russell> instead of the uuid.  It seems like the arrays aren't being
Russell> re-assembled, but debugging output is so limited I can't really
Russell> tell what is going wrong.  I can live-boot an Ubuntu USB stick,
Russell> and can reassemble the arrays, they are clean, I've made
Russell> backups of the files.  So WHY no workie?  The partititions are
Russell> raid-autodetect (or whatever that's called), and the arrays are
Russell> metadata v0.9.

At some point during failure, I see:

  Loading, please wait...
  modprobe: module unix not found in modules.dep
  mdadm: No devices listed in conf file were found.
  Gave up waiting for root device.  Common problems:
   - Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
    - Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
    - Check root= (did the system wait for the right device?)
   - Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
  ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/<uuid-elided> does not exist.
  Dropping to a shell!
  modprobe: module i8042 not found in modules.dep
  modprobe: module atkbd not found in modules.dep
  modprobe: module ehci-hcd not found in modules.dep
  modprobe: module uhci-hcd not found in modules.dep
  modprobe: module ohci-hcd not found in modules.dep
  modprobe: module usbhid not found in modules.dep


  BusyBox v1.20.2 (Debian 1:1.20.0-7) built-in shell (ash)
  Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

  /bin/sh: can't access tty: job control turned off
  (initramfs) _



-- 
Russell Senior, President
russell at personaltelco.net