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earlz

Member

Registered: 2010-07-11

Posts: 39

[Solved] Suddenly mdadm just appears to not load at boot

Hello, I have softraid array set up with mdadm. On reboot today, randomly my computer would not boot.

The error I got was something along the lines of "could not find root device /dev/md3" This error appears to have happened after a mkinitcpio.conf update by pacman(installed as .pacnew)

I don't see any discernible changes in the .pacnew though.

My hook is as so:

HOOKS="base udev autodetect pata scsi sata mdadm filesystems usr shutdown fsck"

df -h output is as so:

[earlz@EarlzZeta ~]$ df -h
Filesystem                          Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs                              968M  696M  273M  72% /
dev                                 3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev
run                                 4.0G  4.8M  3.9G   1% /run
/dev/md3                            968M  696M  273M  72% /
/dev/md5                             38G  5.6G   32G  15% /usr
shm                                 4.0G     0  4.0G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/md0                             90M   21M   65M  24% /boot
/dev/md2                            966M   49M  917M   6% /tmp
/dev/md4                            1.9G  357M  1.6G  19% /var
/dev/md6                            419G  149G  271G  36% /home
/dev/md7                            478G  167G  312G  35% /home/machines
192.168.1.1:/home/shared/pkgcache/   40G  459M   37G   2% /var/pkgcache

What could have broken things after rebooting? And how do I get my machine working again?

Thankfully, I had a backup init image from a 6 month old kernel. It spews tons of warnings, but it managed to get my machine to boot so I could post this at least.

Last edited by earlz (2012-07-11 16:11:05)

lilsirecho

Veteran

Registered: 2003-10-24

Posts: 5,000

Re: [Solved] Suddenly mdadm just appears to not load at boot

Perhaps mdadm.conf is missing.

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ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,700

Re: [Solved] Suddenly mdadm just appears to not load at boot

earlz:  Welcome to Arch Linux.  When posting output please use BBCode 'code' tags in accordance with our policy.  Your readers will appreciate it.  (There is also a link under the text boxes for posts)

Thanks

Last edited by ewaller (2012-07-11 14:47:25)

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ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,700

Re: [Solved] Suddenly mdadm just appears to not load at boot

The mkinitcpio.conf.pacnew file does nothing.  It contains code that should be in the mkinitcpio.conf file, but was not able to place there without over writing your existing mkinitcpio.conf file.  It is up to you to compare those files, and move the content of the pacnew file into the main file.

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Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
The shortest way to ruin a country is to give power to demagogues.— Dionysius of Halicarnassus
---
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

earlz

Member

Registered: 2010-07-11

Posts: 39

Re: [Solved] Suddenly mdadm just appears to not load at boot

The mkinitcpio.conf.pacnew file does nothing.  It contains code that should be in the mkinitcpio.conf file, but was not able to place there without over writing your existing mkinitcpio.conf file.  It is up to you to compare those files, and move the content of the pacnew file into the main file.

Sorry about the BBCode, I use too many forums, some allow BBCode and some don't.

Anyway, I compared the two and didn't really see any differences between the two. I did fix my problem though. I appear to have had GRUB pointing to the wrong initramfs filename (using /boot/linux.img instead of /boot/initramfs-linux.img).

So, I regenerated the initramfs and pointed GRUB to the proper initramfs... Still not quite sure how that broke anything, it should have still worked but been using a slightly out of date kernel. Anyway though my machine works now and should continue to work with more kernel updates