boot from software RAID 1

maenho · 02-19-2005, 08:22 AM

Hi,

I have 2 identical IDE disks which I'm trying to use as a RAID 1 system. On a third disk I compiled a custom 2.6.10 kernel supporting all necessary RAID stuff which runs perfectly (Slackware 10.0). I have 2 raid devices /dev/md0 and /dev/md1. Both come up perfectly at boot (autodetection).

I copied the entire / to /dev/md0 (using cp -xa / /newroot) and use LILO to write the MBR of both disks in the array. When I boot from the raid disks all goes well (raid is autodetected, kernel is loaded, ....) but booting hangs at:

warning: unable to open an initial console

What could be the problem here? I am using udev so maybe that has something to do with, I don't know.

can anybody help me?

madluther · 02-19-2005, 10:12 AM

It sounds like /dev on your raid array is empty. Boot off your third disk, mount your raid array at /newroot and execute the following

Code:

mknod -m 600 /newroot/dev/console c 5 1
mknod -m 666 /newroot/dev/null c 1 3

This should create the minimum /dev entries needed at boot before udev runs.

HTH
Mad.

maenho · 02-20-2005, 03:41 AM

indeed the /dev directory was empty. I just copied the /dev directory from the third disk and now all works.

thank you for your help