Re: [PLUG] Hard drive crazy?

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 9:10 AM, Eric at Lucii.org <eric@lucii.org> wrote:
> Okay, so what's the "secret sauce" for adding/moving/removing drives in a modern Linux system?

I can't speak for Ubuntu in particular, but it seems like the failure
was in your initramfs somewhere.  It seems like it couldn't find your
rootfs.

Posting your grub.conf probably wouldn't hurt, but it seems like
you're identifying your root by UUID which generally should be
reliable when disks change order.

You might try increasing the value of rootdelay on the boot line (or
setting it if it isn't there) - maybe the drivers for that extra drive
are slowing things down and the root drive isn't set up by udev before
the script goes looking for it.  That would be my first guess since
the shell you are dropped into has it there.  You might try setting it
to 10s, or even 30s, and then backing it down to find what works
reliably (shouldn't be more than a few seconds).

I don't know if Ubuntu rolls their own initramfs or if they use
something 3rd-party like Dracut.  I've been having my own share of
headaches trying to get Dracut to work with my RAID (it doesn't
auto-detect and configure it, but running mdadm --assemble --scan from
the resulting shell and then exiting the shell results in a clean boot
- I'm tempted to just hack the script to put that in there though it
is slow, and yes my partitions are type fd and booting without an
initramfs using the same kernel detects them just fine - maybe I need
to fiddle with my boot line or something).

Rich
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