[gentoo-amd64] SATA mdraid woes

[Peter Humphrey]

A few weeks ago I had a hardware problem, and the upshot is that I now have
a new motherboard, a SuperMicro H8DCE. I now can't boot my Gentoo system.

This box has two IDE drives on the primary IDE channel (and two optical
drives on the secondary), and I have two small ext2 partitions on /dev/hda1
to boot Linux. Windows lives in hda3, and I'm using it now to write Webmail.
Grub lives in /dev/hda1, pointed to by BootMagic in the MBR. Hdb is mostly
to keep backups of other things, being 200 GB.

Gentoo lives on two SATA drives, which the BIOS shows me as ide3 master and
ide4 master. I have a small boot partition on each of them, rarely used,
then the rest is given over to several RAID-1 partitions. E.g. the root
partition is on /dev/md2, which is assembled from /dev/sd[ab]5.

When I first got the box back I tried booting with no changes. Blank screen
and no keyboard as soon as I hit the default choice in the grub screen. That
was ok as several hardware changes have occurred. So I compiled a new kernel
to use the new graphics card (PCI Express instead of AGP) and motherboard
chipset (nForce Pro 2200/2050 instead of VIA) and network card (forcedeth
instead of tg3). Still the same, so I backed up all the data, deleted the md
and sd partitions and recreated them all afresh, then restored all the
backed-up data.

Now I get a can't-find-root error. I've experimented with lots of kernel
parameters, both when compiling and on the command line, but I can't get the
system to boot. Here's a selection of diagnostics, which I hope I've
transcribed aright:

--
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LTID] enabled at IRQ22
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xC800 ctl 0xC402 bmdma 0xB800 irq22
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xC800 ctl 0xBC02 bmdma 0xB800 irq22
[that's the ordinary IDE subsystem]
...
scsi2: sata_nv
[so the nForce SATA functionality is compiled in ok]
ata1: SATA link up 1.5Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
ata1.00: ATA-7, max UDMA/133, 398297088 sectors: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
ata1.00: ata1: dev 0 multi count 16
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
scsi3: sata_nv
ata2: SATA link up 1.5Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
ata2.00: ATA-7, max UDMA/133, 398297088 sectors: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
ata2.00: ata2: dev 0 multi count 16
ata2.00: configured for UDMA/133
scsi 2:0:0:0 Direct-Access ATA Maxtor 6L200M0 BANC PQ: ANSI: 5
scsi 3:0:0:0 Direct-Access ATA Maxtor 6L200M0 BANC PQ: ANSI: 5
[that's the two SATA drives]
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LTIE] enabled at IRQ 21
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:08.0[A] -> Link [LTIE] -> GSI 21 (level, low) ->
IRQ21
...
(ata3 to ata8 links down)
...
md: linear personality registered for level -1
md: raid0 personality registered for level 0
md: raid1 personality registered for level 1
[so I've got mdraid compiled in]
...
Activating mdev
Detected real_root as a md device. Setting up the device node
Determining root device...
Mounting root...
...
The root block device is unspecified or not detected.
--
[end of transcript]
Then I'm invited to specify another device, or enter a shell. I use the
shell to say "ls -l /dev/md2", which shows the block device I expect to see,
but "cat /dev/md2" returns an empty result. If I do that from the
installation CD I get a dump of the contents of the md disk, so it seems
that the node exists but it isn't connected to the array /dev/md2.

All I can think of is that I've made an error in creating the RAID-1 arrays,
but can anyone point me to what that might be?

--
Rgds
Peter.


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