[CentOS] SOLVED: LVM, SATA controllers and BIOS devices

Wed May 13 10:37:31 UTC 2009
William L. Maltby <CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com>

On Tue, 2009-05-12 at 16:19 -0500, Chris Boyd wrote:
> On May 12, 2009, at 12:32 PM, William L. Maltby wrote:
> 
> > IMO, yes (maybe). When the Initial install is done, I think there is
> > some stuff that is needed in the initrd to find the disk so root can  
> > be
> > mounted. I'm not sure which initrd file contains it, but I think it's
> > got to be there somewhere. There are some more considerations I had
> > forgotten.
> 
> Thanks, this gave the the hint I needed.
> 
> Looking at the original modprobe.conf file, there was no entry in it  
> for the driver for the second SATA controller.
> 
> So to recover I booted the install CD in "linux rescue" mode.
> 
> Ran "chroot /mnt/sysimage"
> 
> I added
> 
> alias scsi_hostadapter1 sata_promise
> 
> to /etc/modprobe.conf
> 
> Changed to the /boot directory
> 
> mv initrd-2.6.18-128.1.6.el5.img initrd-2.6.18-128.1.6.el5.old
> 
> mkinitrd initrd-2.6.18-128.1.6.el5.img 2.6.18-128.1.6.el5
> 
> After that completed, I rebooted and the system came up clean--no fsck  
> requested or any other oddities, system-config-lvm seems to be working  
> fine.
> 
> No mucking about in /etc/fstab was needed.

Glad all worked out. I now remember why I had to do fstab. I had some
duplicated backups on the hard drives that would be used if the primary
drive failed. During testing booting from the second drive, I needed
VolGroup00 to be VolGroupAA and other similar changes. This is what also
required changes in the init file in the initrd. There is an
--ignorelockingfailure imperitive that references the real root. For
fallback testing, it needed to reference the fallback (VolGroupAA)
volume.

> 
> --Chris
> <snip sig stuff>

-- 
Bill