On Fri, Sep 06, 2013 at 02:29:55PM +0200, Robin Kipp wrote: > Hi list, > I just purchased an HP ProLiant Micro Server G2020T. As for the hard drives, > I installed 4 3TB Western Digital HDs. So far so good, but volumes with a > capacity greater than 2TB require a GPT partition table. Unfortunately, the > server does not support UEFI, and thus can't boot from GPT partitions > natively. > So, when I ran the Debian installer, I used the following partitioning scheme > on all drives since I wanted to combine them in a software RAID: > > 1MB BIOS Boot Partition (BBP) for GRUB > 512MB dedicated /boot partition > partition with all the remaining disk space. > > I then proceeded to setup software RAID: > no RAID on the 1MB BIOS boot partition (not sure if this is correct) > RAID1 for the 512MB /boot partition including all the HDs. > RAID5 for the large partition that remained for file storage. > I then set up the /boot partition (/dev/md0) to contain an EXT3 file system > and also configured the mount point to be / boot. > For the large partition, I setup LVM and created logical volumes for the root > and SWAP partition. I also configured those partitions accordingly so the > installer would know how to use them. > Once I finished, the installation went through without any problems. After > the system was installed, I used the 'Install the GRUB boot loader' option to > install GRUB on all HDS (/dev/sda through /dev/sdd), which worked just fine. > However, when I rebooted the system I got an error message saying the root > file system could not be mounted. I suspected the LVM to cause issues, so I > re-installed everything but this time without LVM. Unfortunately, the same > issue persists… Has anyone here ever been in a similar situation and could > suggest a fix? I have a feeling I may be missing something important, but > just can't find the right path to take…
If you're getting an error saying root couldn't be mounted then I'm assuming that: - BIOS has found GRUB - GRUB has found the kernel - the kernel has booted BUT - the kernel couldn't find the rootfs, so therefore couldn't start init If that's the case, try adding "rootdelay=30" to your kernel command line (the best way is to append it to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in /etc/default/grub and re-run update-grub", but you can temporarily add it at grub's command line editor). "rootdelay" should cause the kernel to wait a few moments for all drives to become ready, the raid to assemble and so on, before it tries to mount rootfs.
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