Hi,

I create a initrd with mkinitrd, and add the initrd to my grub.conf file

But on bootup, my system never gets as far as to run the initrd before trying to mount the root volume

Since my root volume is an LVM partition, it can't root and the kernel panics ... any ideas why my initrd is not running first? Not that I expect anyone to know, just looking for suggestions

Thanks!
George

When you create the initrd, do a mkinitrd -v so that you get verbose information during the creation of the initrd. Look at that output and make sure that the information concerning your LVM stuff is being included in the initrd. It could be that you are in fact loading the initrd at boot time, but the LVM stuff just isn't in it.

that still wouldn't explain why initrd is never being run though, the fact is initrd is never run, let alone lvm being run in it

i did use -v to check, and it is putting the LVM related stuff in just to make sure

Hrm...now I am curious to see what you used for your grub.conf file...

here is my grub.conf:

well, this looks a little suspicious:

# CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD is not set

Hrm. Do you have a boot partition that is not a part of the LVM? It seems to me that grub is getting confused on exactly where the initrd file actually is, though I am not sure why it would continue if it never found the initrd in the first place. I seem to remember kernel boots going nuts when the boot process couldn't find the initrd file in the first place.

Something you may want to look at is exactly what is listed in the boot configuration when you actually boot. Take a look at what is stated there before the machine is even booted and make sure that they match what you expect them to say.

By default, grub doesn't actually look at grub.conf in /boot/grub/grub.conf. It actually looks at /boot/grub/menu.lst, and the grub.conf file tends to be a symbolic link to that file (or the other way around...depends on the distribution). If this symbolic link is broken and there are two different files, you will tend to get a disparity in what you expect and what you actually get.

Oooh...yeah. That does look suspicious. Time to recompile the kernel.

yes!

I'm getting closer, my initrd is now running, it mounts /proc, and then it scans for logical volumes as it should, but then i get:

it seems like execvp doesn't know where to look for those particular files. You may have to do some symbolic linking or something so that when execvp looks for them, it actually finds them. Either that, or figure out where execvp is being run from and change the default places it looks to where things really are during that portion of the boot process.

i'm not sure what execvp is looking for?

is it looking for /bin/vgscan.lvm1 and /bin/vgchange.lvm1?

Heres another question, I only have lvm2 installed, and the vgscan/vgchange that gets inserted into the initrd is lvm2 ... do i need to install old lvm1 stuff?

ok so what i did was copy /sbin/lvm.static to /bin/lvm on the initrd image
lvm.static is:
I then linked all of the following to /bin/lvm in the image:
I rebooted, I see "Scanning for logical drives"

and then it hangs for atleast 2 minutes before I rebooted

any ideas?

Thanks!
George

Are those programes dynamic link or static link. If they are dynamic link, you will have to move the libraries too. Compiling the programs as static to put on a initrd makes it a lot easier, but they take a lot of space and memory.

Read http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/lvm2_boot.html

ahhh, that seems to be one of my problems

the static versions of dmsetup and lvm are like 2 years old, which is what is put into the initrd, however my libraries are newer, how do i include the libraries or statically link? either or is fine with me