Greetings,

After searching the forums I didn't find the exact answer I was looking for, so I thought i'd come here and ask.

I am currently running CentOS v5.3 (64-bit) with a RAID 1 configuration. The drives are also partitioned in half (with Vista on the other half).

I recently had to remove one of the hard drives in order to replace my video card. Upon reboot, I found that the RAID 1 array (software RAID, Intel chipset IHC7) was no longer in sync. I was able to boot into Vista and use Dell's matrix raid software to resync the drives. However, upon booting into CentOS, I am taken to a command prompt with the follownig error messages:

fsck.ext3: Device or resource busy while trying to open /dev/sda5
Kernel alive [FAILED]
An error occured during the file system check.
Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot when you leave the shell
Give root password for maintenance

sda5 is my Linux partition and sda1 is Vista

As you might have noticed already, i'm not very knowledgable with repairing Linux problems, so any help is greatly appreciated!

Best regards,

Jason

or they were prior to your fix.

Better post your fstab -l and your menu.lst from /boot/grub. You do that by opening up a terminal window from a rescue disk, or just typing it from your command prommpt might work as well, assuming you have access to your filesystem from that command prompt.

I presume you setup CentOS with the drives already setup in RAID using the same firmware? CentOS should then be using dmraid to recognize the drives and not mdadm. You might want to read up about the difference if you don't know; it'll be helpful later, perhaps.

Yes, the RAID (intel isw) was configured and setup when I purchased the computer. From the startup disc i'm using I cannot run fstab (command not found).

dmraid -r gives:

/dev/sdb: isw, "isw_biaeideiab", GROUP, ok, 1250263726 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sda: isw, "isw_biaeideiab", GROUP, ok, 1250263726 sectors, data@ 0

sudo dmraid -ay isw_biaeideiab_Volume0 says that:

RAID set "isw_biaeideiab_Volume0" already active
RAID set "isw_biaeideiab_Volume01" already active
RAID set "isw_biaeideiab_Volume02" already active
RAID set "isw_biaeideiab_Volume03" already active
RAID set "isw_biaeideiab_Volume05" already active

Sorry for my ignorance on this issue, but i'm still learning many of the basics, and I don't have a system admin to turn to.

Best regards,

Jason

You'll have to find a rescue disk that can run fstab, mount your dmraid disks so we can look at your grub menu and so forth. Knoppix is a popular choice.

The fstab file in /etc/fstab contains:

aufs / aufs rw 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0

...and that's all

Hmm that's your temporary fstab. You'll have to mount your arrays with a rescue disk and look at the (no longer) running system. If you can, you should be able to look in /dev/mapper and find the isw_biaeideiab_Volume0X devices to mount.

Something like

mount -t ext3(or whatever) /dev/mapper/isw_biaeideiab_Volume0 /mnt/example

but you HAVE to mount the right one. Probably best to do it read-only. Some of those may be pieces of the RAID, the other one will be the RAID.

I have done the following per your request:

sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/mapper/isw_biaeideiab_Volume05 /mnt/

The files are now mounted under /mnt

I am downloading Koppix now and will run fstab -l

Thanks for all the help (and patience) so far. I have to take off now, so I will post the fstab results tomorrow I'll read more about dmraid so that I can give you more information tomorrow.

Regards,
Jason

Great! when you look in /mnt, you should find /mnt/boot/menu.lst, which is grub's configuration file for booting. Post it too please.

Ok, sorry for the late reply, but I was doing some reading to solidify my background a little before posting.

I thought i'd just spit out some info, and see if anyone can help me make anything out of it.

First off, grub:

#find /grub/stage1
(hd0,1)
(hd0,0)

#fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 640.1 GB, 640135028736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77825 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 40794 327675904 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 40795 40807 104422+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 40808 41851 8385930 82 Linux swap /Solaris
/dev/sda4 41852 77825 288961155 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 41852 77825 288961123+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 640.1 GB, 640135028736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77825 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 40794 327675904 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2 40795 40807 104422+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 40808 41851 8385930 82 Linux swap /Solaris
/dev/sdb4 41852 77825 288961155 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 41852 77825 288961123+ 83 Linux

Secondly, my menu.lst file is located in /mnt/sysimage/boot/grub:

#boot=/dev/mapper/isw_biaeideiab_Volume0
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title CentOS (2.6.18-128.2.1.e15)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.2.1.e15 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.18-128.2.1.e15.img
title CentOS (2.6.18-128.2.1.e15)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.2.1.e15 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.18-128.2.1.e15.img
title CentOS (2.6.18-128.e15)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.e15 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.18-128.e15.img
title Vista 64bit
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

Are the menu.lst and grub.conf files supposed to be the same?

Also, I loaded the Knoppix live CD and could not run fstab on it. "Command not found". I am not currently working in rescue mode.

Regards,
Jason

I should also mention that when I now boot my computer it gets hung-up at "GRUB loading stage1.5". I can get past this by going into rescue mode, but it's still there nonetheless.

Sorry for the spammage, but I thought this info may also be helpful.

contents of /dev/mapper:

isw_biaeideiab_Volume0
isw_biaeideiab_Volume0p1
isw_biaeideiab_Volume0p2
isw_biaeideiab_Volume0p3
isw_biaeideiab_Volume0p4
isw_biaeideiab_Volume0p5

My fstab is located in /mnt/sysimage/etc and reads:

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
LABEL=SWAP-isw_biaeid /swap swap defaults 0 0

Regards,
Jason

Hmm, if you're getting stuck at stage 1.5 and you re-made your RAID, I'll bet that either you just need to reinstall grub, which you can do with a grub floppy, SuperGrub or grub-install (not sure with CentOS). If you change your root(hd0,1) to root (hd0,0) in menu.lst, it'l probably work too, but you'll still have a corrupt grub on the other disk.

Problem is finally solved. In fstab, the LABELs were picking up the images (i.e. /dev/sda5) instead of pointing to the actual drives (i.e. /dev/mapper/isw_biaeideiab_VolumeX).

Re-syncing RAID 1 with dmraid now should be simple.

Thanks for all of your input.

Jason