non-root partitions do not mount during boot (solved)

hvengel · Guru Joined: 19 Sep 2004 Posts: 515

My disk that I have Gentoo installed on is going bad so I am in the process of reinstalling to different disks. Since the old setup is showing signs of corruption I decided that I would do a fresh install to make sure everything was OK. I am using 2006.0 on an amd64 machine. I have partitioned my setup as follows:

/boot /dev/sda2
/ /dev/sda3
/home /dev/hdf2 (same partition I have this on in the old installation)
/usr /dev/hdf2
/var /dev/hdf8

I installed a stage 3 tarball from the 2006.0 Universal install ISO. I used genkernel to keep things simple (I will hand configure a kernel when I get the base system working). Everything during the install went fine up until it was time to reboot. When it boots everything is normal until it trys to mount the non-root partitions. So it mounts / but fails to mount /var, /usr and /home. It says that the partitions do not exist. I am able to log in as root and when I try to mount the partitions by hand all of them mount without any problems. It appears that for some reason the boot process is trying to mount these partitions before they are ready and the mount fails but by the time there is a login promt the partitions are available to mount. Of course because the boot process fails to mount these partitions other stuff fails in the boot process like setting up the network, loging and so on. Up until the mount failures there are no error messages during the boot process.

I am not sure what the issue is or where to look to fix it. I have checked my grub.conf and fstab to make sure and these look fine. The kernel I used is the current gentoo-sources for amd64 which is 2.6.16-r13.

Anyone have any ideas what I should be looking for to fix this?

azuriel · Apprentice Joined: 27 Feb 2005 Posts: 166

Does /boot mount okay? If it does, there might be a hdf issue.

You could try compiling your filesystem drivers into the kernel, if they are currently modularized.
_________________
Adopt an unanswered post
TJGames.org

The folly of mistaking a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. -Valery

hvengel · Guru Joined: 19 Sep 2004 Posts: 515

I have /boot setup to not mount so I will have to test this. I don't think there are nay problems with /dev/hdf since hdf2 mounts fine in my existing gentoo installation.

Since I am running genkernel the file system drivers are very likely modularized. I will rebuild the kernel with these built in to see if that helps. It is possible that it tries to mount the file systems before the drivers are fully up. But if that is the case how can it mount / ? In any case I will give that a shot.

hvengel · Guru Joined: 19 Sep 2004 Posts: 515

Turns out that the problem was that the driver for the controller that the disk is attached to was being loaded as a module. When I modified the kernel config so that this driver was compiled into the kernel the problem was fixed.