[gentoo-server] SOLVED (3.3 TB reiserfs volume not mounting at boot, and is unusable afterwards)

[Jared Klett]

Rich's response got me to thinking - I had seen a reference back  
when I was building a similar server. after some creative googling, I  
found it:

http://www.coraid.com/support/linux/contrib/chernow/gpt.html

	the key note is at the bottom of the page:

"Without this on, strange things happen. For instance, rebooting the  
machine caused the file system to no longer be mountable or the GPT  
table got corrupted."

	aha! exactly my problem! I rebooted the machine and watched the  
console carefully, and noted this:

* System.map not found unable to check symbols

	hmmmm. after some more googling, I found this discussion:

http://tinyurl.com/o57hm

	so I found the solution to making this message go away to be to copy  
System.map to /., which is mounted when the message pops up during  
the boot process, whereas /boot and /usr are not. then we edit the  
block at the end of /sbin/modules-update to be:

if [ -d "`depdir`" -a -f /proc/modules ]
then
         if [ -f /System.map ]; then
                 depmod -a -F /System.map ${KV}
         else
                 ewarn "System.map not found - unable to check symbols"
         fi
fi

	and viola, the boot process is happy once more.

	as an added bonus, this resolves the issue with the filesystem being  
usable after a reboot, and mounting at boot time. woohoo!

	thanks to all that replied. it always helps to bounce ideas off  
others to get the juices flowing.

cheers,

- Jared


On Aug 24, 2006, at 12:18 PM, Jared Klett wrote:

> hello Gentoo server folks,
>
> 	I have a 2U server with a 3ware 9500-12MI controller. there are
> two 80 GB drives in RAID-1 which servers as the boot device, and
> ten 400 GB drives in RAID-5 which I want to have mounted as a
> single volume at /data.
>
> 	if I start fresh and create the filesystem after the system has
> booted, and mount it, all is well. however, when I reboot the
> system, the filesystem won't be mounted and I'll get an error.
>
> 	to start, I used GNU parted to partition the device, which is at /
> dev/sdb. here's a transcript of the session:
>
> Using /dev/sdb
> (parted) mklabel
> New disk label type? gpt
> (parted) print
> Disk geometry for /dev/sdb: 0kB - 3600GB
> Disk label type: gpt
> Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name
> Flags
> (parted) mkpart
> Partition type?  [primary]?
> File system type?  [ext2]? reiserfs
> Start? 0.0
> End? 3600G
> (parted) print
> Disk geometry for /dev/sdb: 0kB - 3600GB
> Disk label type: gpt
> Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name
> Flags
> 1       17kB    3600GB  3600GB
> (parted) quit
>
> 	I then do a plain:
>
> root ~ # mkreiserfs /dev/sdb1
> mkreiserfs 3.6.19 (2003 www.namesys.com)
> Guessing about desired format.. Kernel 2.6.17-gentoo-r4 is running.
> Format 3.6 with standard journal
> Count of blocks on the device: 878881520
> Number of blocks consumed by mkreiserfs formatting process: 35033
> Blocksize: 4096
> Hash function used to sort names: "r5"
> Journal Size 8193 blocks (first block 18)
> Journal Max transaction length 1024
> inode generation number: 0
> UUID: 80864192-b2b1-4f20-ab16-a1242e5cfa1b
> ATTENTION: YOU SHOULD REBOOT AFTER FDISK!
>         ALL DATA WILL BE LOST ON '/dev/sdb1'!
> Continue (y/n):y
> Initializing journal - 0%....20%....40%....60%....80%....100%
> Syncing..ok
>
> root ~ # mount /dev/sdb1 /data
> root ~ # df -h
> [ ... snip ... ]
> /dev/sdb1             3.3T   33M  3.3T   1% /data
>
> 	and all is well.
>
> 	however, when I update /etc/fstab and reboot the machine, the
> kernel loads and mounts the reiserfs filesystems on the boot
> volume, but then I get:
>
> reiserfs_open: the reiserfs superblock cannot be found /dev/sdb1.
> Failed to open the filesystem.
>
> 	here's a screenshot of the console:
>
> http://www.project55.net/noloveatboot.png
>
> 	I hit Control-D and allow the system to finish booting. then I
> attempted this:
>
> root ~ # mount /dev/sdb1 /data
> mount: you must specify the filesystem type
> root ~ # mount -t reiserfs /dev/sdb1 /data
> mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
>        missing codepage or other error
>        In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
>        dmesg | tail  or so
> root ~ # dmesg | tail
> [ ... snip ...]
> FAT: bogus number of reserved sectors
> VFS: Can't find a valid FAT filesystem on dev sdb1.
> ReiserFS: sdb1: warning: sh-2021: reiserfs_fill_super: can not find
> reiserfs on sdb1
>
> 	this message makes me a bit suspicious. I've tried creating the
> reiserfs filesystem from inside parted using mkfs, but I just get
> this, in spite of having reiserfsprogs emerged before I emerged
> parted:
>
> No Implementation: Support for creating reiserfs file systems is
> not implemented yet.
>
> 	I'm running kernel version 2.6.17-gentoo-r4, with the following
> enabled:
>
> Block layer  --->
>  [*] Support for Large Block Devices
> Partition Types  --->
>  [*] Advanced partition selection
>  ...
>  [*] EFI GUID Partition support
>
> 	just for complete information overload, here is the status of the
> RAID unit as reported by the 3ware controller:
>
> Status: OK
> Capacity: 3.27 TB
> Type: RAID 5
> Stripe: 256kB
>
> 	any insights would be most welcome!
>
> cheers,
>
> - Jared
>
> --
> Move 'sig'. For great justice.
>
> --
> gentoo-server@g.o mailing list
>

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