LVM & reiser4 - [SOLVED]

[Treovo]

I've searched my way through the forums and read all of the LVM topics available in the gentoo documentation section as well as lot s of articles and posts in various forums and guess what....I end up here begging for help.
Most of them deal with RAID related problems...therefore the title of the post...

As my /usr partition filled up (probably because of a wong use of USE variables) I decided to give reiser4 a go and set-up Reiser4 and LVM on my hard drive following Lxnay's instructions and the LVM2 gentoo install docs.
/boot /home and / are on non-LVM partitions whereas /home /usr /var /tmp /opt / are.

Everything went fine until the first reboot

I get a kernel panic: the kernel complaining about not being able to locate partitions (8,3).

Here is my fstab:

[Twist]

Are you sure it's the kernel that says it can't find a partition? Because if I remember correctly, the only filesystem the kernel absolutely needs is root (/), everything else is read in user land.

In that case, your problem is not LVM or RAID at all, it's the fact that your kernel can't figure out how to mount a reiser4 partition on its own. At the risk of blaming the obvious, are you quite sure the kernel you are loading has reiser4 built in and not as a module?

-Twist

[Treovo]

Well...good point.
I think I've built that in. I'm always builduing monolithic kernels so that I'm not bothered by modules.

I can't access my PC now but I guess I've enabled the "4kb stacks" option and enabled support for Reiserfs. I'm not 100% sure but I guess this shouldn't be the problem.

Anyway, your mention of userland helped me think of the problem in another way. I think I'll have to have a look at this concept.
And if only root is needed for the system to boot, then I can forget this LVM and vgchange thing.

However, I'm wondering with the kernel is complaining about this particular partition (8,3)...
I'll keep you posted.

Thanks for your help.
_________________
.: Free your mind and your ass will follow :.

[Treovo]

I've checked the kernel options yesterday but everything is built-in: reiserfs & the 4KB stack option is NOT checked.
Support for SATA is also there and the disk is recognised.

I still get a kernel panic, the kernle being unable to mount partition (8,3) because of an unknow file system or parition...

I've even tried the mm-sources because I've read that kernel 2.6.10 has some problems booting SATA drives, but no chance....

Any clue?

..I feel like a year ago when I first installed gentoo. At that time I had to wait 3 weeks until I could get the kernel to boot. Well I guess I'm still a noob
_________________
.: Free your mind and your ass will follow :.

[Twist]

You should be able to see the mount of / in the boot text. If you are getting past this point, then the easy way to figure out where your issue may be is to temporarily start mounting the utility directories (/var /tmp) from / instead of the LVM. That will tell you whether the LVM is the problem or not.

-Twist

[Treovo]

Thanks for the tip...but I still need to get past this point...
I still get a kernel panic and boot can't be mounted, I guess and hope that the LVM part should not be problematic after boot is mounted.

So it looks like I'm back to where it all began: kernel config.
I have a SATA hdd and must say that even if it's supported by the kernel I always had problems installing.
In my first config it took me 3 weeks to figure out that it was seen as hde instead of sda.
Now it looks like sda is the right label...

Anyway, I played with the kernel config yesterday but still no way to boot the damn thing.

I'll try 2 things tonight:
- reactivate the old sata support in the kernel config
- try to get the 2.6.5 nitro sources. Lxnay's RR4 CD boots the disk provided I pass acpi=off and nousb to the kernel
_________________
.: Free your mind and your ass will follow :.

[Twist]

Sata support changed substantially around 2.6.8 I think it was. You're correct that one of the major implications of that is SATA devices went from being IDE (hdX) to SCSI (sdX) from the kernels perspective.

Although that's a bit of a pain, I've had a lot better luck with the newer code, and by all accounts on kernel mailing list is substantially better and less hackish than the old stuff. I would use it if possible.

What happens when you boot a recent Knoppix as far as drive recognition?

-Twist

[Treovo]

I do not have any recent version from Knoppix on hand but will try it.

However, Knoppix never recognised my SATA drive..at least with the versions I tested.
I've tried to pass various options to the kernel like noapic or acpi=off but it did not work.

I did not have time to work on this issue yesterday but will keep you posted. And hopefully I'll post from my machine soon

Cheers.
_________________
.: Free your mind and your ass will follow :.

[Treovo]

I've finally found out that I was using a wrong kernel and thus missing reiser4 support . However I even namesys.com is not mentioning that reiser4 should be enabled in the kernel and not reiserfs.

This might sound trivial for many of you guys but let me tell you that when you don't understand 100% of what you're doing every come counts
And the explanation their site on how to patch grub are really bad. I mean REALLY BAD.

It's the kind of explanation you can't understand if like me you're fighting your way into the linux world by googling all over the place and are still a newbie.

Anyway...

So now that I've built the kernel (mm sources 2.6.11-rc2-mm2) with reiser4 support grub won't boot at all .
I can see the first lines flickering on the screen then it gets dark and the cursor is blinking at the bottom of the screen, waiting for a hard reset.

Is grub 0.94 reiser4 enabled?
If it needs patching would someone be so kind to explain how to do that in a noob-proof way?

I've been trying to boot this damn computer for more than one week...any help to get me back on track will as usual be highly appreciated.
_________________
.: Free your mind and your ass will follow :.

[Treovo]

HELP!!
_________________
.: Free your mind and your ass will follow :.

[Treovo]

After rebooting twice the system finally mounted correctly the LVM partitions.
Reiser4 is working fine except one or two fsck I had to do after a hard reset of the system.

By reading this post again I realise that I've written most of the messages...
Should I go for a blog or were all my mistakes so obvious that the 180 people that have read this post thought I'd figure it out on my own ?
_________________
.: Free your mind and your ass will follow :.