Kernel does not detect one drive partition

cheexo · n00b Joined: 02 Jan 2003 Posts: 6

I have a Dell poweredge 350 rack server with 2 ide drives on sepparate ide controlers.

The idea was to raid1 these 2 drives with md, then on one large raid partition, cut it up into logical volumes with lvm.

The distinguishing factor being that I don't want to use evms. So I use the 1.2 cd for the install boot because it has md and lvm, but I pull down a 1.4 tarball.

The short story is that I have no problem installing and building my raid devices and then the lv's on top of that. But when I reboot, the kernel finds the raid devices without lvm's but acts like the one that has the lvm's on it does not exist. In other words, when it scans those drives, it picks up only raid partitions that do not have logical volumes on top.

The funny thing is, if I boot off of the cd again, it finds everything just fine. Same with the 1.4 cd, though it converts everything to evms which I don't want.

Now the reason I think this is an issue between the hardware and the kernel, is because I have successfully done this type of install on other machines. But, I've tried it on 3 identical dell poweredge 350's and the exact same thing happens on each one.

I've posted variations on this question in the last couple of days to no response. If this needs to be in a different forum please let me know, but I really need help with this one.

I've been over and over my kernel config, and I can't put my finger on whats missing. Though admittedly I have no idea some of that stuff is for.

Cheexo

cheexo · n00b Joined: 02 Jan 2003 Posts: 6

Ok, I've been working on this and have made some discoveries.
Hopefully it this will at least prompt somebody to come out of the woodwork to discuss this with me.

When I have used this technique on other machines, I have set all of the raw partitions to fd - Linux raid autodetect.

On a hunch, I decided to try setting /dev/hda4 and /dev/hdc4, the partitions that make up the md3 raid1 device that is not working, to 8e - Linux LMV.

Reboot, and boom, kernel fires up and all lv's are mounted successfully. But I check on /proc/mdstat, and there is not an entry for md3.

But to my thinking, the raid device must have been started becasue otherwise, there would me nothing to mount.

Is this correct? Does LVM automatically start the raid device?
And why would an instalation on one type of machine not care if all of the partitions are linux raid autodetect, but these dell poweredges require that the partition with LVM be linux LVM?

Somebody? Anybody? <crickets...>

cheexo · n00b Joined: 02 Jan 2003 Posts: 6

Update and more learning...
All LVM is doing is scanning the drives, seeing a Linux LVM partiton and loading it with the path hda ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part4. It doesen't even mess with hdc. So no it's not magically starting the raid device.
moving on...

I have narrowed this down to an ide/kernel problem.
The ide chipset is PIIX4. I have built and tried kernels both with and without the additional PIIX support options and the result is the same. Noooo worky.

Here is what dmesg spews out:

hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: dma_intr: error=0x10 { SectorIdNotFound }, LBAsect=156296248, sector=151283968
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:04 (hda), sector 151283968
md: disabled device ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part4, could not read superblock
md: could not read ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part4's sb not importing!
md: coule not import ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part 4!
md: autostart ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part4 failed!
ide0: reset: sucess

There is not output for hdc.

So for somereason when I boot from the kernel on my hardware, it freaks out on the partition that has the LVM on top of md. The other raid devices (md0, md1, md2) work fine.
Again, when I boot from the 1.2 cd (and the 1.4 cd but using evms) it works. Which suggests to me that something is wrong with my kernel config, though I can not figure out what.

Why does it work with the cd? What additional kernel config options might be relevent to either the PIIX4 ide chipset or the ide drives themselves?

Any takers? What are you people, scared?
<crickets...>

cheexo · n00b Joined: 02 Jan 2003 Posts: 6

Ok. Forget it.

For anybody out there that thinks that they might try to get any kind of software raid with logical volume management to work on a dell poweredge 350 with ide drives on sepparate channels working with gentoo linux, I would recomend that you pass on that hardware/linux combination.

Me and my co-admin have been working on it for 2 solid weeks and we're giving up. Since we like gentoo, we're sending the hardware back to Dell. We're going to suck it up, spend the extra $ on SCSI and hope for the best.

But hey everybody, thanks for all the words of encouragement and helpfull suggestions. This thread is what the forumns are all about. A comunity of users helping eachother.
You all have been really great... really...
<crickets...>