On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 10:46:26PM -0500, Robert wrote:
On 08/30/2010 09:24 PM, fred smith informed us:
<snip>another curious thing I just noticed is this: the list of kernels available
at boot time (in the actual grub menu shown at boot) IS NOT THE SAME LIST THAT APPEARS IN GRUB.CONF. in the boot-time menu, the kernel it boots is the most recent one shown, and there are other older ones that do not appear in grub.conf. while in grub.conf there are several newer ones that do not appear on the boot-time grub menu.
most strange.
BTW, this is a raid-1 array using linux software raid, with two matching drives. Is there possibly some way the two drives could have gotten out of sync such that whichever one is the actual boot device has invalid info in /boot?
and while thinking along those lines, I see a number of mails in root's mailbox from "md" notifying us of a degraded array. these all appear to have happened, AFAICT, at system boot, over the last several months.
also, /var/log/messages contains a bunch of stuff like the below, also apparently at system boot, and I don't really know what it means, though
<snip>
This is not the magic solution that you quite understandably would prefer. I hope someone can pinpoint your trouble. UNTIL THEN, I think you would be 'way ahead to make a full backup (or 2) to an external drive, disconnect that baby and start troubleshooting, confident that you won't lose all your data.
I'll bet that #cat /proc/mdstat looks really scary. Mine looks like this: [root@madeleine grub]# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md0 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0] 409536 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md2 : active raid1 sdb3[1] sda3[0] 3903680 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md3 : active raid1 sdb4[1] sda4[0] 108502912 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md1 : active raid1 sdb2[1] sda2[0] 375567488 blocks [2/2] [UU]
unused devices: <none> [root@madeleine grub]#
here's mine (indented for readability):
cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md0 : active raid1 sdb1[1] 104320 blocks [2/1] [_U] md1 : active raid1 sdb2[1] 312464128 blocks [2/1] [_U] unused devices: <none>
Other than that, the system boots from /boot/grub/grub.conf and that should be what you see during the boot process. The other two, /etc/grub.conf and /boot/grub/menu.lst are symlinks to the real deal
yes, they're all symlinked correctly.
It might be interesting to have a look at /etc/fstab then issue a mount command with no arguments to see if anything is mounted on /boot
hmmmm.... I find th is in /etc/fstab:
/dev/md0 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
and this in the output of a bare mount command:
/dev/md0 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
so those look OK.
You might find valuable RAID 1 information at: http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-set-up-software-raid1-on-a-running-system-i...
I'll take a look at that link. thanks.
I'll also dig for the HOWTO I used when setting it up. As I look at this I recall that I had to tweak the scripts that create the initrd. so, if one of the updates since has reinstalled that, I may no longer be getting the desired initird built. sounds ominous...
Thanks for the info!