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

Tue May 12 21:19:26 UTC 2009
Chris Boyd <cboyd at gizmopartners.com>

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.

--Chris