From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753904AbZJ0DfL (ORCPT ); Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:35:11 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753411AbZJ0DfK (ORCPT ); Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:35:10 -0400 Received: from smtp.tuells.org ([204.188.108.206]:47492 "EHLO tuells.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753220AbZJ0DfJ (ORCPT ); Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:35:09 -0400 X-Greylist: delayed 6442 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at vger.kernel.org; Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:35:09 EDT Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:47:51 -0600 From: marcus hall To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <20091027014751.GA3144@bagatelle.tuells.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.19 (2009-01-05) X-Spam_score: -1.0 X-Spam_bar: - Subject: Cannot access non-LVM /boot partiton. Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hello.. I have a Fedora system that I recently upgraded to Fedora 11 and subsequently I cannot access my /boot partition. I have upgraded several systems without any problems, and I am not sure what to look at that may be the source of the problem. I've asked on the fedora list with no response, and although I don't think that it is a kernel problem, perhaps somebody can point me to the right corner of userspace to start looking deeper. The problem system has a pair of SATA disks that are mirrored. They each contain two partitions, a /boot partition on /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1, and an LVM setup on /dev/sda2 and /dev/sdb2. After booting the system, the only disk device files in /dev are /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, and /dev/sdb2. Grub sees the boot partition just fine and gets into the kernel, which fails after userspace starts mounting the filesystems because it cannot find /boot. If I run fdisk, it is happy with the partition table on either disk. During boot, the kernel seems to be recognizing the partitions on both disks, since it shows "sda: sda1 sda2" etc. But, something seems to be disabling access to the first partition later on. If I manually create a /dev/sda1 or /dev/sdb1 device file, whenever I try to access it I get ENODEV. When I try to boot an earlier kernel that the system was running happily on before, I get the same problems, so I believe that this is due to some change in user space during the "upgrade". It does seem reasonable to block access to the /dev/sdaX devices, since the mirroring works from the /dev/sdbX devices, and I am suspecting that something is removing /dev/sdb1 because it has no LVM data on it, or something. I'm suspecting that this might be something in udev, but that's a weaker guess. What could remove access to a disk partition in the kernel after it comes up? If I cat /proc/partitions, all I see are the LVM partitions. Thanks in advance! Marcus Hall marcus@tuells.org