To start out with, I have a fileserver running FC6 that is made up of the following hardware:
Asus A7N8X-E mobo
3GB of 184-pin PC3200 DDR RAM
2 180GB WD ATA HDs in a software based RAID-1
NVidia 440MX Video Card
This setup has served me well for 2 years but due to an increased number of users, I am starting to get an increase in CPU overhead with the software based RAID. Because of this I have ordered a set of WD 250GB SATA drives in an attempt to make use of the RAID-1 feature on the onboard Silicone Image 3112 controller.
Over the weekend I booted the server from a Knoppix CD and attempted to begin setting things up. I started out by connecting only one SATA drive and booting from the CD. When I got into Knoppix I copied all the data from my ATA RAID to the SATA hard drive using cpio (dd wouldn't cooperate with me). After I verified that all the data was copied to the disk, I rebooted and used the RAID configuration tool on the motherboard to clone the first SATA drive onto the second SATA drive and then put both drives into a RAID-1. At this point I booted from the Knoppix CD again and was very surprised to see that Knoppix recognized the RAID and loaded the appropriate sata_sil driver. Once I got into the Knoppix destkop I reloaded GRUB and modified the fstab file to point to the new RAID device.
And this is where the %&*! hit the fan. After I got GRUB reloaded on the RAID I rebooted and attempted to boot off the new RAID. Everything was going fine when I booted up...Grub loaded with no problems, the kernel began to load without errors, then BAM!...a kernel panic. By looking at the error messages that were spit out, it appeared that the kernel could not locate some of the system files. It complained that it couldn't find the filesystem "/dev/root" and that "setuproot: moving /dev/ failed" (it also gave this message for sys and proc).
When this happened I just figured that the proper driver wasn't loading at bootup and that the kernel couldn't see the RAID. To remedy this, I made a new initrd using mkinitrd and told it to preload scsi_mod, sata_sil, sd_mod, libata, and ext3. I then rebooted the computer and was able to get a bit further. Instead of complaining that it couldn't find "/dev/root" it complained that it couldn't find the resume device at "/dev/mapper/sil_xxxx2" which is the swap partition on the RAID, but it still complained about /dev, /sys, and /proc.
Right now I'm totally stumped as to what to try next. It appears that GRUB and fstab are setup correctly on the new RAID, but for some reason that kernel can't find any of the filesystems. Can anyone help me out with this?
Linear Mode
