Re: 2.6.30-rc8 Oops whilst booting

Chris Clayton
2009-06-08T08:09:12Z

Hi Neil,

Thanks for the reply.

2009/6/7 NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>:
> On Mon, June 8, 2009 8:31 am, Jaswinder Singh Rajput wrote:
>> On Sun, 2009-06-07 at 19:38 +0100, Chris Clayton wrote:
>>> 2009/6/7 Jaswinder Singh Ra
>>> >> > http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/8931/dscn0610.jpg
>
> This message says that it found a vfat filesystem on 8:3x (I cannot see
> what digit should be 'x').  That is probably sdc1 or sdc2. Maybe even
> sdc6 or sdc7.
> However the vfat filesystem didn't have /sbin/init.
>

>>> http://img99.imageshack.us/my.php?image=dscn0617b.jpg
>
> This one says it couldn't find anything at 8,22, which I think
> should be sdb6.
> It also shows that you have and sdc6, but sdb only goes up to sdb3.
>
> So it seems that your disk drives have changed name - not a wholely
> unexpected event these days.
>
> We now need answers to questions like:
>  - what device do you expect the root filesystem to be on
>  - how is the kernel being told this?  Maybe it is hard coded
>    into your initrd.  Knowing which distro and what /etc/fstab
>    says might help (though it wouldn't help me, I'm just about out
>    of my depth at this point)
> Maybe if you changed /etc/fstab to mount by uuid instead of hardcoding
> e.g. /etc/sdb3, and then run "mkinitramfs" or whatever, it might work.
>

Yes, I've just been looking at the photographs of the panics again and
I've noticed that two of my discs are being detected in the "wrong
order". There are three HDDS. The first, /dev/sda, is the master on
the first IDE port and contains sda1..sda7. The second, normally
/dev/sdb, is the slave on that port and contains sdb1..sdb6. The
third, normally /dev/sdc, is attached to the first SATA port and
contains sdc1..sdc3. The second photograph I posted shows that sdb and
sdc have been reversed. The first partition on the disc that is
normally /dev/sdb does indeed have a FAT32 filesystem in the first
partition.

By the way, I should have said that in between the panics that the two
photographs show, I copied contents of /dev/sdc1, which I normally
boot from, to /dev/sdb6, so that I minimised the risk to sdc1 in the
reboot festival that bisecting would involve. I also, of course,
changed the name of the root partition that is passed to the kernel by
GRUB and amended /etc/fstab on /dev/sdb6. That's why the partitions
shown in the photographs seem inconsistent. Sorry I forgot to mention
that - I really shouldn't do these things late at night :-).

As I indicate above, when booting the partition I have set up to do
this bisecting, I expect the root filesystem to be on /dev/hdb6. As I
also indicate, this information is passed to the kernel through GRUB's
/boot/grub/menu.lst. The kernel is configured specifically for my
system and the drivers needed to boot the system are built in to the
kernel, so I don't use an initrd. IIRC, that's the way Slackware is
installed today, except, of course, it's a big fat kernel with all
drivers needed to boot any system built in. I could be wrong on that
though, it's a while since I installed

As to the distro, it used to be (the now defunct) Peanut Linux, which
was derived from Slackware. However, it's years since I installed it
and I have upgraded just about everything in user space and added many
other things (udev, dbus...). I don't think that makes any difference
here, though, because we don't get as far as user space. On a
successful boot, the system is stable and runs trouble-free for
several hours a day, every day.

Hope this helps.

I'm a good way through bisecting again and this time the system has to
boot without a panic 100 times before I mark a kernel as good. I'll
post the result later.

Thanks

> Good luck,
> NeilBrown
>
>

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