Ubuntu
dmraid package

Ubuntu 12.04 on fakeraid stripe won't boot "Gave up waiting for root device."

Asked by Guido van Loon

I have a fresh install of Ubuntu Desktop on my old Dell Dimension 8300. This box has a Promise Fasttrak raid controller a.k.a. softraid or fakeraid. It is setup with two identical drives in raid0, stiped.

I had a hard time getting the installer to run without errors. Did all kind of manual steps to make the installer complete.
I installed from a pendrive, booted the liveCD. Used dmraid -ay and gparted to partition the drive. Did nothing special with the partitions one swap and one root partition. The installer ends up grubbing my pendrive instead of my harddisk so I followed a manual to purge an reinstall grub2 on the correct disk here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1581099)

Now when I boot, the computer shows a graphical off-black screen (ubuntu boot color???) and nothing happens. When I then reboot with Ctrl+Alt+Delete a second time. I get GNU GRUB menu and I choose "Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-29-generic-pae". After a while I got thrown in busybox because of the root device was not found: ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/8693f1c2-3eb1-41a4-ba10-3fbe860144a1 does not exist.

When I type "dmraid -ay" [Enter]
I see three messages like RAID set "pdc_ccgcdegci" was activated.
Press Crtl+D the computer will continue to boot normally.

The next time I boot I need to reboot to get pass the off-black screen and into the GNU Grub menu again.

I found bug report 941874, but I checked and the fixes described there seem to be in place on my machine...
I tried the steps described in "http://www.humans-enabled.com/2012/03/how-to-fix-ubuntu-1204beta-boot-problem.html" to no avail.

I'm new to the whole Ubuntu/linux thing and I just want my computer to boot without manual intervention. Please help.

Thanx!

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Revision history for this message
actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

Are both drives healthy? You can test them at a low level using the Ultimate Boot CD

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Guido van Loon (gcmvanloon) said : 		#2

Yes both drives are good. The stripe array is in top notch condition.

I think the problem lies with dmraid not getting loaded automaticly but I've no idea where to go and check for this...

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Phillip Susi (psusi) said : 		#3

Instead of running dmraid -ay, can you run ls /dev/mapper and post the results?

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Guido van Loon (gcmvanloon) said : 		#4

Thank you for responding.

Running ls /dev/mapper instead of dmraid -ay shows only one device named "control".

After running dmraid -ay ls /dev/mapper shows the following:
control
pdc_ccgcdegci1
pdc_ccgcdegci
pdc_ccgcdegci5
pdc_ccgcdegci2

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Phillip Susi (psusi) said : 		#5

Please post the output of blkid

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Guido van Loon (gcmvanloon) said : 		#6

blkid does not output anything if I don't run dmraid -ay first.
Then the outut is this:

/dev/mapper/pdc_ccgcdegci1: UUID="8693f1c2-3eb1-41a4-ba10-3fb3860144a1" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/mapper/pdc_ccgcdegci5: UUID="b2a3a93d-451f-4066-8f48-de5cb30bf048" TYPE="swap"

Note that the UUID of /dev/mapper/pdc_ccgcdegci1 is the id of the root device the operating system gave up waiting for...

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Phillip Susi (psusi) said : 		#7

It doesn't show *anything*? It should say something about /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. What if you run blkid -p /dev/sda?

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Guido van Loon (gcmvanloon) said : 		#8

Hi,

ls /dev/sd*
/dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb /dev/sda1 /dev/sda

blkid -p /dev/sda
/dev/sda: PTTYPE="dos"

this is the same for sdb

Revision history for this message
Phillip Susi (psusi) said : 		#9

It looks like blkid is not recognizing that your disks are part of a pdc raid. Converting this to a bug report. Please run sudo dmraid -rD. This will create a directory with some files in it. Please tar up that directory and attach to the bug report.

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grtdh ygtrfd (yahey84) said : 		#10

Yes exactly the same issues here I am facing with ubuntu 12.04 you can see here https://proremovalsrochdale.co.uk/ how much it effects my running projects.

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