Gutsy initramfs fails to boot from md partition

Screenshot 1 from the boot.

Screenshot 2 from the boot.

Screenshot 3 from the boot.

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The Hardy Heron Alpha series was recently released. Alpha2 and subsequent releases contain an updated version of the kernel. You can download and try the new Hardy Heron Alpha release from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/hardy/ . Please note that Alpha3 will be released within the next day or two so you many want to wait. You should be able to then test the new kernel via the LiveCD. If you can, please verify if this bug still exists or not and report back your results. General information regarding the release can also be found here: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ .

I've opened a new task against the actively developed kernel and am closing the task against linux-source-2.6.22. Thanks!

I just ran into this on the -server kernel for gutsy. It appears that 'md' and 'raid1' are not included in initramfs. To fix, I did:

1. adjust /etc/initramfs-tools/modules to have:
md
raid1

2. updated the initramfs with:
$ sudo update-initramfs -k 2.6.22-14-server -c -t

It was not clear from the above comments that raid1 is included in the hardy kernel.

Hi Jamie,

I just chatted with the kernel guys. I'm reassigning to initramfs-tools. Regarding Hardy, md looks to be built in but raid1 is still modular. Thanks!

I just upgraded my Gutsy to Hardy and the bug is still there.

Ok, this goes now to wfm/wtf territory.

What I did was a clean reinstall of Gutsy. After reinstall the machine booted just fine 2-3 times and then the bug appeared again - initramfs failed to mount the root partition.

I now proceeded to do a clean reinstall of Gutsy *and wiped all the partitions on the root md raid with /dev/zero*. This approach seems to work this far, I managed to add all the md devices and the system still boots.

So my educated guess is that some earlier version of md software has written some magic bytes to some of the partitions so that the newer versions of it, combined with Gutsy initramfs, could not cope with. This sounds like a combined bug of md tools not upgrading all the metadata on the md partitions during upgrade and initramfs dropping some legacy support too early.

However, with the process described above I now again have a system that can boot Gutsy kernels, so the problem is solved for me and thus I propose this bug is marked resolved for now. If the bug comes again, I'll get me more chicken blood and reopen this.

The md partition in question was rather old, preceeding the first Ubuntu release, so there has been plenty of time for the md tools to make incompatible changes to the magic data.

Zds,
    Can you verify this in the current development release of Lucid? If not, or if I don't hear from you, I'll close the bug as Invalid.

Thanks!

-JFo

Gerry C,
     Please refrain from assigning bugs. If you want kernel-bugs to get notified of events occurring on a bug, you can subscribe them in the right hand section devoted to subscriptions.

Thanks!

-JFo

This bug was filed against a series that is no longer supported and so is being marked as Won't Fix. If this issue still exists in a supported series, please file a new bug.

This change has been made by an automated script, maintained by the Ubuntu Kernel Team.