Ubuntu
mdadm package

Can't assemble dm devices in initrd: script missing?

Bug #155355 reported by Hadmut Danisch
4
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
mdadm (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: mdadm

Hi,

after upgrading to gutsy my machine does not boot anymore (except with the old feisty kernel).

The problem: It sticks for some time in the initrd and then opens an emergency shell, because
the root file system (on mdadm raid partition) is not found.

As far as I can see the problem is that the scripts to be put into /scripts/local-top in initramfs
are missing in the mdadm package. There's an empty directory listed in mdadm's package, which implies
that something went wrong with packaging.

regards

Revision history for this message
Hadmut Danisch (hadmut) wrote :

Just some additional remarks:

As far as I found out the assembly of the md devices should not be done by scripts (which could have been removed intentionally), but by script entries in the udev directories: Whenever a file system of type raid is added, udev should call mdadm --assemble...

However, it does not work reliably. It sometimes works to create the raid device for my root file system. But even then it still fails to assemble the second file system. Interestingly, even mdadm --assemble --scan does not work in this case, I then have to assemble it manually. Strange.

Revision history for this message
Hadmut Danisch (hadmut) wrote :

Seems to be a problem of mdadm itself:

mdadm does not find the devices for my second raid device with --scan and complains that they don't have the correct UUID. But if I read the UUID manually, it is exactly the same. The problem does not occur with feisty's 2.6.20 kernel. So it might be an incompatibility between 2.6.22 and mdadm.

Revision history for this message
Hadmut Danisch (hadmut) wrote :

I've done some more tests.

When booting under feisty/2.6.20, everything is fine. When booting under gutsy/2.6.22, the machine assembles only 3 of my 4 raid devices.

The reason:

Because of some earlier upgrade (I had to replace a disk when upgrading from edgy to feisty) one entry in /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf had a wrong UUID. While the UUIDs on the disks were correct and consistent, in mdadm.conf that entry had still the old UUID, i.e. a different one.

Obviously, under feisty this did not matter, so the problem was not related to the kernel version, but to the ubuntu version that generated the initramfs. With gutsy, the contents of mdadm.conf started to matter and that's why things went wrong until mdadm.conf was corrected.

Solved, can close that bug.

regards
Hadmut

Revision history for this message
xteejx (xteejx) wrote :

Marking Fix Released as per your comment about this being fixed in a later release. Thank you for the update :)

Changed in mdadm (Ubuntu):
status: New → Fix Released
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