topic MSA500 and mondorescue in Operating System - Linux

MSA500 and mondorescue

axel_s — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 08:11:42 GMT

Hello,

I have problems when restoring my backup made with mondorescue. On my ProLiant DL385 running with RH-EL4, I have an internal RAID-controller SmartArray6i for the internal harddrives and another controller (SmartArray642) for the external drives in a MSA500.
With internal disks only, everything works fine. Only when using disks inside MSA500 there is a problem.

When booting from the mondo-rescuedisk, mondo can't mount any partitions located in the MSA500. In mondo-restore.log I found some hints:

Warning: Neither 'raidstart' nor 'mdrun''found. RAID devices may not have started.

...

Warning - these modules did not make it onto the ramdisk
... cciss ... scsi_mod

...

mount: /dev/cciss/c1d1p1 is not a valid block device

The problem seems to be, that mondo can't find the drivers to mount the drives in MSA.
What is wrong?

Re: MSA500 and mondorescue

Ivan Ferreira — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 08:36:45 GMT

I supposse that you are trying to restore the operating system to the MSA500, is this right?

Probably, you must create a new initial ram disk "before" take the backup, and force the initial ramdisk to include the drivers for the SCSI drivers including cciss, for example:

mkinitrd -f --with=cciss /boot/initrd-$(uname-r).img $(uname -r)

Re: MSA500 and mondorescue

axel_s — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 09:35:30 GMT

The cciss.ko drivers are on the ramdisk.
And the internal SCSI-controller for the internal disks is working fine. The internal disks are /dev/cciss/c0d0p1 etc.
Only the external disks in the MSA 500 are not mounted (controller SA642 and /dev/cciss/c1d1p1)

Perhaps the SA 642 needs another SCSI-driver, but I don't know which one.

Re: MSA500 and mondorescue

Steven E. Protter — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 09:49:40 GMT

Shalom,

Ivan is right.

I seriously question the wisdom of booting off one of these systems.

A pair of local disks lets you boot and diagnose other problems. A SAN problem means game over and a rescue disk won't help.

SEP