So I think I hit on something - I have been reading about this non-stop for a couple of days, and one thing that popped up once or twice was that similar problems were related to BIOS RAID. I tried to enable BIOS raid way back when I built my computer, but was never able to get WinXP to work properly when it was enabled, so I gave up and thought I'd go without it. Apparently there is still some kind of metadata on the disk that identifies it as part of a RAID array.
Here are some of the sites I found useful:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=176623 (look all the way at the bottom in the last post)
http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1262135235697+28353475&threadId=1104168 (The key here was the multi-path dm-X stuff)
So I was able to verify that both sdb and sdc had metadata indicating they were configured for RAID:
Code:
[User@machine ~]$ sudo dmraid -r
/dev/sdb: nvidia, "nvidia_debebddi", mirror, ok, 488397166 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sdc: nvidia, "nvidia_debebddi", mirror, ok, 488397166 sectors, data@ 0
Then I removed the sdb metadata:
Code:
[User@machine ~]$ sudo dmraid -r -E
Do you really want to erase "nvidia" ondisk metadata on /dev/sdc ? [y/n] :n
Do you really want to erase "nvidia" ondisk metadata on /dev/sdb ? [y/n] :y
Then I rebuilt the initrd with:
Code:
kv=$(uname -r); mkinitrd --stuff -v -f /boot/initrd-$kv.img $kv
This came from
http://osdir.com/ml/fedora-test-list.../msg00188.html.
After this, I rebooted, and I was able to follow through the rest of the process for creating a physical volume, adding it to the vg_machine volume group, creating logical volumes, creating the filesystem, and finally mounting the drive and writing files (see link in previous post)! I mounted it like this (which is different from what I would have expected, but similar to what is found in fstab):
Code:
sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/mapper/vg_machine-lv_data /mnt/data
So, I think it's fair to say I probably have the same issue with sdc. This leaves me with two questions: Can I simply remove the raid metadata from sdc with the
dmraid -r -E command, rebuild the initrd, reboot, and expect to be able to mount the disk without losing any information?
And now when I do fdisk -l I get this:
Code:
...
normal stuff for sda, sdb, and sdc omitted
...
Disk /dev/dm-0: 21.4 GB, 21428699136 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2605 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table
Disk /dev/dm-1: 5955 MB, 5955911680 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 724 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Disk /dev/dm-1 doesn't contain a valid partition table
Disk /dev/dm-2: 250.0 GB, 250059348992 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x1050104f
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/dm-2p1 1 30401 244196001 7 HPFS/NTFS
Disk /dev/dm-3: 250.0 GB, 250056705024 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30400 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x69205244
This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/dm-3p1 ? 13578 119522 850995205 72 Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/dm-3p2 ? 45382 79243 271987362 74 Unknown
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/dm-3p3 ? 10499 10499 0 65 Novell Netware 386
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/dm-3p4 167628 167631 25817+ 0 Empty
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.
Partition table entries are not in disk order
Disk /dev/dm-4: 250.0 GB, 250056015872 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30400 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Disk /dev/dm-4 doesn't contain a valid partition table
Some of this was there before, but the stuff at the very end is new and looks messy. Should it be there? Should I try to get rid of it? How do I get rid of it? (OK, this is more than two questions...)
I appreciate all the help everyone has contributed so far!
Thanks,
Kerry
