Hi All,

I have a problem making dmraid mirror with two SATA disks on nForce4 chipset.

I want to install Mandriva 2006.0. In BIOS I make a Mirror RAID on two SATA drives. During Mandriva instalation DiskDrake sees one device /dev/nvidia_bfeigfad of the size of my SATA drive, which meens that doring instalation process everything goes fine, i.e. mirroring works.

When RAID is active the only bootloader possible to install is GRUB. So I do install it. The problem comes when instalation process is complete and I reboot the computer. GRUB is loaded but when I select to start Linux I get these messages:

pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed: 2
umount /initrd/sys failed: 2
umount /initrd/proc failed: 2
Initrd finished
Freeing unused kernel memory: 268k freed
Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try padding init= option to kernel

I think I need to change something in GRUB. But what and how?

Thank you

Can we see grub.conf and /etc/fstab?

Sorry, I cannot see these files at the moment. I will try to see them later. But it must be something generated automaticaly, because I didn't change anything by hand. Installation process went completely fine, as it would be on one disk without any RAID. But when I rebooted after installation, then it hanged up.

Well:

That means the kernel doesn't know where your root (ie: '/') partition is. You need to append this to the kernel command line in grub's configuration file.

Sorry for a stupid question, I am quite new to Linux. But how to see /etc/fstab file if only grub is loaded?

I don't know how to see grub.conf file too untill linux is loaded . But what I can see in grub window is:

kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz
root=/dev/mapper/nvidia_djaebfeb1
resume=/dev/mapper/nvidia_djaebfeb5
splash=silent
vga=788
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.img

When I partitioned disks during instalation, I made these partitions:

nvidia_djaebfeb1 '/'
nvidia_djaebfeb5 'swap'
nvidia_djaebfeb6 '/home'

So now I found out how to look at my /etc/fstab file. It is:

/dev/mapper/nvidia_aafidaje5 / ext2 defaults 1 1
/dev/mapper/nvidia_aafidaje1 /boot ext2 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0022, user, iocharser=iso8859-1, codepage=850, noauto, ro, exec, use rs 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/mapper/nvidia_aafidaje6 swap swap defaults 0 0

The grub loader option had these lines:

kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz
root=/dev/mapper/nvidia_aafidaje5
resume=/dev/mapper/nvidia_aafidaje6
splash=silent
vga=788
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.img

(I reinstalled the system on other disks so grub loader differs a bit from the earlier one)

It seems that everything should be OK because "fstab" and "grub" looks compatable (at least for me). But I get that " Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try padding init= option to kernel" error anyway.

So what I did was: with "linux rescue" disk I changed fstab file as:

/dev/sda5 / ext2 defaults 1 1
/dev/sda1 /boot ext2 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0022, user, iocharser=iso8859-1, codepage=850, noauto, ro, exec, use rs 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda6 swap swap defaults 0 0

and the grub option as:

kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz
root=/dev/mapper/sda5
resume=/dev/mapper/sda6
splash=silent
vga=788
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.img

Linux loaded normally but of course without RAID 1.

I did

# dmraid -s

and got:

*** Active Set
name : nvidia_aafidaje
size : 78161326
stride : 128
type : mirror
status : ok
subsets : 0
devs : 2
spares : 0

as it should be. But doing

# modprobe dm-mirror
# dmraid -ay

gave me:

ERROR: dos: reading /dev/mapper/nvidia_aafidaje[No such file or directory]

By the way, when I mount "/dev/sdb5" the content is the same as "/dev/sda5", which meens that Mandriva2006 was realy installed on the mirrored disks.

As far as I can understand all this story, installation goes on two mirrored disks. But after instalation finishes and computer reboots, then grub cannot load the system on the mirrored disks. Maby it is the problem that some modules are not loaded or something?

Please, could anybody explain what is happening.

Thank you