Documentation? failure to update-initramfs causes Infinite md loop on boot

Documentation? failure to update-initramfs causes Infinite md loop on boot

[Moshe Yudkowsky]

I reformatted the disks in preparation to my move to a RAID1/RAID5 
combination. I couldn't --stop the array (that should have told me 
something), so I removed ARRAY from mdadm.conf and restarted. I ran 
fdisk to create the proper partitions, and then I removed the /dev/md* 
and /dev/md/* entries in anticipation of creating the new ones. I then 
rebooted to pick up the new partitions I'd created.

Now I can no longer boot, with this series of messages:

md: md_import_device returned: -22
md: mdadm failed to add /dev/sdb2 to /dev/md/all: invalid argument
mdadm: failed to RUN_ARRAY /dev/md/all: invalid argument
md: sdc2 has invalid sb, not importing!

Thousands of these go past, and there's no escape. That's quite a severe 
error. I'm going to boot on a rescue disk to fix this -- there's no 
other way I can think of to get out of this mess -- but I wonder if 
there ought to be documentation on the interaction between mdadm and 
update-initramfs.

-- 
Moshe Yudkowsky * moshe@pobox.com * www.pobox.com/~moshe
"Becoming the biggest banana republic in the world -- and without the 
bananas, at that -- is an unenviable prospect."
    			-- Sergei Stepashin, Prime Minister of Russia

Re: Documentation? failure to update-initramfs causes Infinite md loop on boot

[maximilian attems]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 04:32:46PM -0600, Moshe Yudkowsky wrote:
> I reformatted the disks in preparation to my move to a RAID1/RAID5 
> combination. I couldn't --stop the array (that should have told me 
> something), so I removed ARRAY from mdadm.conf and restarted. I ran 
> fdisk to create the proper partitions, and then I removed the /dev/md* 
> and /dev/md/* entries in anticipation of creating the new ones. I then 
> rebooted to pick up the new partitions I'd created.

pretty simple, you change mdadm.conf put it also on initramfs:
update-initramfs -u -k all

Re: Documentation? failure to update-initramfs causes Infinite md loop on boot

[Moshe Yudkowsky]

maximilian attems wrote:

> pretty simple, you change mdadm.conf put it also on initramfs:
> update-initramfs -u -k all

Sure, that's what I did after boot on rescue, chroot, etc. However, I 
wonder if the *documentation* -- Wiki, or even the man page discussion 
on boot -- should mention that changes in the mdadm.conf have to be 
propogated to /boot?

In fact, that's an interesting question: which changes have to propagate 
to /boot? I'd think any change that affects md devices with /etc/fstab 
entries set to "auto" would have to be followed by update-initramfs. 
That's quite some bit of hidden knowledge if true.

-- 
Moshe Yudkowsky * moshe@pobox.com * www.pobox.com/~moshe
   "All friends have real and imaginary components."
                      -- Moshe Yudkowsky