>>>>> On Wed, 12 Apr 2000, "Darren" == Darren Nickerson wrote:
Darren> But now, it won't boot into degraded mode. As I try to boot redhat to
Darren> single user, I am told:
Darren> Starting up RAID devices: /dev/md1: Invalid Argument
Darren> /dev/md1 is not a Raid0 or linear array
Darren> and dmesg says:
Darren> md: could not lock [dev 21:01], zero size?
Darren> Marking faulty
Darren> Could not import [dev 21:01]!
Darren> Autostart [dev 21:01] failed!
Well, thanks to the heroic effort of one subscriber to this list, I have a
working array. He shall remain nameless to keep everyone from running to
him with their troubles ;-) The fix was to reorder the entries in raidtab,
being careful not to change the actual RAID ordering, just the entries which
specified them.
The explanation as it was given to me:
> raidstart looks in the raidtab and finds the first device that the
> raidtab says is in the array. It then reads the superblock there and
> tells the kernel to import whatever devices that superblock says there
> are.
> Now the kernel at boot time finds the first device that has partition
> type 0xfd, which by coincidence happened to be the first device in
> your raidtab too. It does the same, and fails miserably just like
> raidstart.
> The superblock on the first device was simply screwed up beyond
> repair, yet had the superblock magic intact, that's why we never saw
> any reasonable error report.
> By re-ordering the devices in the raidtab, the kernel was told to try
> with a (luckily intact) superblock from one of the other disks.
A very big and heartfelt thank-you to my saviour ;-)
-darren
