Hello everyone. Newbie here. I just started at a new position as administrator for a small lab, one week ago. Friday, I was confronted with the mess below. There's about 1TB of data on a SCSI storage system that I should not lose. After a reboot of the DELL Poweredge 6450 server I was met with the following error messages during startup. I would be eternally indebted to those that help me resolve this problem...

DELL Precision errors during start up :

Ch A, SCSI ID: 1 ADIC FastStor DLT ASYN
SCSI ID: 3 ASYN – Connected but not ready

…

HA-0
Following SCSI ID’s are not responding
Channel 0, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8
2 Logical drive(s) found on the host adapter
1 Logical drive(s) failed
HA-1
1 Logical drive(s) found on the host adapter
3 Logical drive(s) handled by BIOS
…

Partition table not found
…

***After selecting the kernel from the GRUB menu***
…
Partition check
sdb: sdb1, sdb2, sdb3 <sdb5, sdb6, sdb7, sdb8, sdb9, sdb10, sdb11>
SCSI device sdc: 1719066624 512-byte hdwr sectors (-219349 MB)

sdc: SCSI disk error: host 4 channel 2 id 0 lun 1 return code = 25040001
I/O error: dev 08:20, sector 0
Unable to read partition table
SCSI device sdd: 1001771008 512-byte hdwr sectors (512907 MB)

sdd: sdd1, sdd2, sdd3, sdd4 < sdd5, sdd6, sdd7, sdd8>
…

Mounting root filesystem
Mount: error 6 mounting ext3
Pivotroot: pivot_root (/sysroot, /sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
Freeing unused kernel memory: 240 K freed
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init = option to kernel.
…

****GRUB config file contents ***
* root (hd0,1)
* kernel /vmlinuz-.2.4.7-10enterpise ro roo=/dev/sda10
* initrd /initrd-2.4.7-10enterprise.img
*****************************

The DELL system comes with a REDHAT 7.0 distribution but the it looks like the enterprise edition was added at a later time. Is there anyway to just reinstall 7.0 without the risk of losing the 1TB??

I have tried to use rescue mode to some things but I can't even pull up an editor. What editor should work in rescue mode? I am pretty much powerless at this point.

Thank you in advance.

Error messages even before the kernel loads suggest a hardware problem. I'm not familiar with GRUB, so I am not sure where it is looking for the kernel and initrd (initial ramdisk).

The kernel panic sounds alarming but is just the consequence of the kernel not finding the files it needs to continue loading. This could be caused by a hardware problem, a misconfiguration of the bootloader (GRUB), or missing drivers in the kernel.

A live CD with good hardware capabilities (like Knoppix) would let you check things out.

THanks for the response. The server came back up on its own. I changed nothing. The cause of the original problem remains a mystery. I believe it has something to do with some SCSI devices temporaryily malfunctioning??? But thanks for your comments.

Well, a good point to archive your 1 TB data and do some hardware check on that server! There was hardware malfunctioning so there will be another one just in the near future. Be prepared for this issue.
My guess were, there's either a SCSI device powering failure, rack/device array malfunction on some SCSI bus or SCSI controller malfunction. Anyway, I'd do this hardware check ASAP. And don't forget to secure these 1 TB data.

Kind regards,
sbogus

THanks for the helpful suggestions. Do you think that if it were a SCSI hardware problem, could I simply unplug the faulty device and things should be able to boot normally. If you look up at my original post, the first error was:
Ch A, SCSI ID: 1 ADIC FastStor DLT ASYN
SCSI ID: 3 ASYN �EConnected but not ready

but during the reboot that ended in correctly finding the kernel and booting Linux, that error message turned into:

Ch A,
SCSI ID: 1 ADIC FastStor DLT ASYN
SCSI ID: 3 <device name which I can't remember> 20.0

Those two devices are the disk reader and the robotic controller for the CLT backup system. Again, what I am thinking is that if I simply disconnect this DLT machine the next time I encounter this problem, I would be able to boot normally. It 's a big presumption, i know....

Or would I have to change some SCSI configurations also? And if I don't change the configuration, will I make it worse???

Thanks for your time.

Of course, you might be correct - a faulting device on the SCSI may cause inflicted faults in other SCSI devices on that channel.
I'm afraid, simply disconnecting that DLT machnine would not solve the problem. Also I'm afraid it is not a configuration problem you can solve by re-configuring the devices. It should be a hardware reconfiguration not software one.

Kind regards,
sbogus

Excuse my utter ignorance about SCSIs but how would I do a hardware reconfiguration? Dip swithces or something? Thanks again.

No not that way, surely you could use switches or whatever on the disks and the cards is, but what I've meant with "reconfiguration" was to check and replace unreliable hardware with more reliable one.

Kind regards,
sbogus