[CentOS] Centos 5.5, not booting latest kernel but older one instead

Tue Aug 31 02:24:19 UTC 2010
fred smith <fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us>

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 08:41:31PM -0500, Larry Vaden wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 8:18 PM, fred smith
> <fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us> wrote:
> >
> > Below is some info that shows the problem. Can anyone here provide
> > helpful suggestions on (1) why it is doing this, and more importantly (2)
> > how I can make it stop?
> 
> Is there a chance /boot is full (read: are all the menu'd kernels
> actually present in /boot)?
> 
> (IIRC something similar happened because the /boot partition was set
> at the recommended size of 100 MB).

/boot doesn't appear to be full, there appear to be 25.2 megabytes free with 20.1 available.

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
the lines mentining a device being "kicked out" seem ominous:

Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: device-mapper: uevent: version 1.0.3
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: device-mapper: ioctl: 4.11.5-ioctl (2007-12-12) 
initialised: dm-devel at redhat.com
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: device-mapper: dm-raid45: initialized v0.2594l
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: Autodetecting RAID arrays.
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: autorun ...
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: considering sdb2 ...
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md:  adding sdb2 ...
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: sdb1 has different UUID to sdb2
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md:  adding sda2 ...
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: sda1 has different UUID to sdb2
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: created md1
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: bind<sda2>
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: bind<sdb2>
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: running: <sdb2><sda2>
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: kicking non-fresh sda2 from array!
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: unbind<sda2>
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: export_rdev(sda2)
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: raid1: raid set md1 active with 1 out of 2 mirro
rs
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: considering sdb1 ...
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md:  adding sdb1 ...
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md:  adding sda1 ...
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: created md0
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: bind<sda1>
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: bind<sdb1>
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: running: <sdb1><sda1>
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: kicking non-fresh sda1 from array!
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: unbind<sda1>
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: export_rdev(sda1)
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: raid1: raid set md0 active with 1 out of 2 mirro
rs
Aug 30 22:09:08 fcshome kernel: md: ... autorun DONE.

> 
> Kind regards/ldv
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-- 
---- Fred Smith -- fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us ----------------------------
                    Do you not know? Have you not heard? 
    The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. 
  He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.
----------------------------- Isaiah 40:28 (niv) -----------------------------