Re: [Cooker] Kernel 2.6.24 booting harddisks as /dev/sdx, why?

On 2008/07/19 23:01 (GMT+1000) Steve Morris apparently typed:

> Luiz Fernando N. Capitulino wrote:

>>  Man, either you have screwed up your system or you have triggered
>> a bug we are not aware of.

>>  I should also say that your reports are a bit confusing, at least
>> for me.

>>  Could you please, describe in a simple way what the first problem
>> you have got was?

>>  I have asked our QA team to begin a series of tests to try to
>> reproduce the problem you are reporting. They are going to try
>> all possible cases (alpha2 installs, upgrades, etc).

> My first issue was highlighted by a 'df -h' command which provided the
> following output:

> df -h
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sdb5              37G   33G  4.1G  89% /
> /dev/hdd1             403M  2.8M  400M   1% /mnt/acronis
> /dev/hdd5             2.0G  496M  1.6G  25% /mnt/interface

The above has me puzzled. I'd expect the it8212 devices to start with hdc or
hde. Do you have the hdd HD slaved to an optical device? That's something I'd
never do, being far more trusting of a HD controller to optimally manage an
optical than the other way around.

> /dev/sda1              37G   33G  4.0G  90% /mnt/vista
> none                  506M   28K  506M   1% /tmp

Same size of both total and used for both / and Vista, and so little
freespace on both? Yikes.

> The two /dev/sdx disks are ide devices plugged into the ide ports on the
> motherboard. As I am using the 2.6.24 kernel these should be /dev/hdx,
> as libATA was not migrated to until kernel 2.6.5 onwards.

What motherboard manufacturer/model/chipset? (aka, is there one IDE channel,
or two, on the non-it8212 IDE controller?)

> My second issue was the Felix suggested that the problem with the hard
> disks being /dev/sdx instead of /dev/hdx was probably that the initrd
> images had been overwritten.

Exactly, and you've yet to answer my question. The symlinks probably have
nothing to do with the root problem, which is a mkinitrd behaving similarly
to https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=41825 where the switch from legacy
to libata is mishandled for your system's hardware configuration. The answer
should lie in the timestamps on the initrds. When was the 2.6.24 kernel
installed, and when was its last initrd timestamped? Do you have an initrd
backup for 2.6.24? If so, you need to try it.

> When I checked in /boot the initrd symlinks
> were pointing at the initrds for kernel 2.6.26-desktop-0.rc9.1mnb even
> though I was booting off the 2.6.24 kernel. The system.map and config
> symlinks were correctly pointing at the 2.6.24 equivalents, but initrd
> was not. I relinked the initrd symlinks to point to the 2.6.24
> equivalents, but when I rebooted after this change the two motherboard
> hard disks were still /dev/sdx.

When you get a good initrd/kernel combination, you should back them up
locally, adding special symlinks if that suits you, and a custom stanza in
menu.lst, so that errant installation scripts and config files don't kill
your ability to boot. Whatever non-expected names you assign to the backup
protects them against errant installation scripts rendering them useless. e.g.:

title Mandriva Cooker (2.6.24 w/ backup initrd)
kernel (hd0,22)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-1mdv root=LABEL=hda05cooker vga=791 noresume
initrd (hd0,22)/boot/initrd-ok-2.6.24-1mdv.img

Note the LABEL= above. That's your ticket to no need to care what /dev name
is assigned to your / partition. Set it with tune2fs -L, use that label in
fstab and menu.lst, and the /dev assignment shouldn't matter, as long as you
don't need access to partitions >15 per HD.

> My third problem was that the installation of the 2.6.26-9 kernel
> changed all the (hd1,x) entries in grub's menu.lst to (hd2,x) hence grub
> could not find anything.

Everyone running alpha or beta OS versions should spend some time at a grub
prompt so as to understand how to bail from menu.lst errors without forcing a
rescue boot. As long as usable kernels and initrds exist somewhere grub can
find them, you can use the grub command line to load them and achieve a
normal init.
--
"Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry."
                                Ephesians 4:26 NIV

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/