Simen Thoresen a écrit :

Hi people,

I ran into one of these silly issues I'd like to share as I think the reason behind it may be a flaw in the current initrds.

The setup; Dual-Xeon Intel-chipset motherboard. SATA-disk attached to ICH, onboard Adaptec SCSI-controller.

Installed system, updated packages, no problems. Basic, non-LVM partition setup - OS-disk is /dev/sda, single filesystem-partition /dev/sda1 is labeled LABEL=/, and fstab uses the label to access the filesystem.

I now add a SCSI-disk (previously used) to the onboard SCSI-controller, and the fun starts. The onboard controller is identified as scsi0 and scsi1, the SATA-disk sits on scsi2. SCSI-disk is thus /dev/sda, and SATA-disk becomes /dev/sdb. This should not be a problem as the fstab refers to the partition by label and not device name.

And then disaster! While booting, the system issues 'Checking root filesystem' (I'm not 100% sure about the output here), and craps out on a badly broken /dev/sda1. On the SCSI-disk, /dev/sda1 is an extended partition, with /dev/sda5 being the partition that holds the filesystem. Thus fsck'ing /dev/sda1 does not bring any useful. But why?

Why does the initrd insist on fsck'in /dev/sda1, when it should check LABEL=/?

Is there something I'm not getting here?

it should be a grub problem: even if filesystems are now labelled, grub enumerates present hard drives ... and have the same problems than Lninux with sda becoming sdb. Its configuration file (SATA:/boot/grub/menu.lst) should be updated as well, especially the root keyword.

grub is launched from the first bootable drive (/dev/sdb) that is saw as disk hd(1) I guess.

So in its configuration file, you should duplicate the default entry (when installed on SATA standalone disk) and change "root hd(0,1)" into "root hd(1,1)"

To achieve it, boot from CD/DVD in rescue mode, mount manually your /boot (in / perhaps) and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst

my $0.02

Pierre Bourgin