After having copied a OpenSuse 10.2 system with software-raid ( disk-mirror with 2 IDE harddisks) to a different set of harddisks, Linux can no longer boot on the new disks, when I boot with the standard Open SuSE 10.2 kernel.
The error message is from MD saying that it can not find any devices for my three raid partions /dev/md0 (swap) , /dev/md1 (/) and /dev/md2 (/home)
md: No device found for /dev/md0...
and the boot sequence halts.
The strange thing is that if I boot the system with a standard Linux 2.6.19.1 kernel, also on the harddisk (no module support), or if I connect the harddisk to a MS Virtual PC, it boots just fine. The problem has apparently something to do with the OpenSuSE 10.2 std kernel. If I boot the rescue system from the dvd, it also looks just fine ! (cat /dev/mdstat).
On the harddisk where the system was originally copied from, it works perfectly.
To see if I could locate what actually made the system unbootable with
the std. SuSE kernel, I made a completely new installation, moving the data from the old system to the new, step by step. First I made a new SuSE installation on a new harddisk with the same raid partitions md0, md1 and md2. Then I booted the recover system and copied all directories except /boot and /etc/mdadm.conf. When booting the new system, everything worked fine. I then installed the 2.6.19 kernel and edited the /boot/grub/menu.lst accordingly. and booted again. Still working ok. OK it must be the /boot files I thought, and to confirm this c I copied the old /boot to see if that was the case. But when booting, both kernels still worked !!?. When booting the 2.6.19.1 vanilla linux kernel, it uses some kind of autodetect to find matching raid partitions and complains about different UUID's on the raid partitions, but that's probably because the kernel is compiled without module support, and does therefore, at that time, don't have access to /etc/mdadm.conf. It matches the /dev/hdax names with the /dev/mdx device correctly though, so I presume it's no big deal. Maybe the explanation has something to do with low level md driver problems when running two different versions of the kernel. I remember that I, at some point, had used mdadm on the 2.6.19.1 kernel when rearranging some of the /dev/mdx devices, after the md autodetect mounted the /dev/hda1 to md3 and not md0. Maybe the reason for my problem is that the newer md drivers in 2.6.19.1 does things to the md-drives that is incompatible with the older SuSE 10.2 standard 2.6.18-34 kernel. /Bo -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org