Booting on RAID set failing

[pll at lanminds.com]

In a message dated: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 16:11:02 EDT
bscott at ntisys.com said:

>  Those two usually indicate the wrong filesystem got mounted as root (or
>your filesystem is trashed).  It could not open an initial console because
>/dev/console is missing, and it could not find init because /sbin/init is
>missing.

Hmmm, yeah.  I think I found the problem.  When your / and /boot are 
on a RAID set, lilo doesn't quite know where things are yet since the 
raid stuff hasn't been started.  You need to pass disk geometry stuff 
to lilo so it can figure out where things are.  It's all documented 
in the Boot+Root+Raid+LILO mini-HOWTO. 

I'm fiddling with it now, I'll let you know how it works :)

>  Can you boot from a CD or other external media, start the RAID sets, and
>fsck the filesystems (as a sanity check)?

No, the system has 4 IDE drives, no floppy or CDROM, hence the 
attempt to build systems using FAI.

I actually have the FAI install working fairly well, so now I'm going 
even further into this madness by taking your suggestion of mirroring 
everything across the 4 drives :)

At some point when I have all the basic set up, I build a bunch of 
systems which export all their spare drive capacity via NBD, and use 
either LVM or EVMS to access them.  (Yes, I'm building my own NAS out 
of spare parts :)

-- 

Seeya,
Paul
--
	It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
   but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.

	 If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!