Adding disk to ML350 RHEL3 U5

[Chris Swenson]

I have a ML350 G2 with 2 of the hot swap slots filled with 36 gig disks and a internal 72 gig disk on the scsi chain. SDA1 (36)is /boot, SDA6 is /usr, SDB1 (36) is /var, SDC1 is /home (72). My /var partiton is near full and I wanted to slip in 72 gig disk into the next open hot swap slot. While boot the bios and Rh apparently recognize the new disk, however when it gets to the file system check it pauses and offers me CTRL-D or log on as root. I have moved partitions a number of times of the years but I am in unfamiliar territory with the hot swap disks. Any guidence out there?
Thanks in advance
Chris S.

[Ivan Ferreira · Accepted solution]

I think that probably the device names changed when you installed the new disk, and when the system starts and checks the disks, it cannot find a file system where it should be, for example, expect /var in sdb1 but now sdb is sdc, and so on.

Before installing the new disk, I would modify /etc/fstab to use the file system LABEL instead of the hard partition name, for example instead of:

/dev/sdb1 /home

I would use

LABEL=/home /home

You can check the file sytem label and set one with the e2label command.

Once you use labels instead of hard device names, the device names can change but your won't have problems to mount your file systems.

[Chris Swenson]

So I would clean up my existing fstab (Listed at bottom) with.

#e2label /dev/sdc1 /home
#e2label /dev/sdb1 /var

Then I get a bit lost on the swap partitions
#e2label /dev/sda7
#e2label /dev/sdb2
The examples I found did not address swap partitions.

[root@freya etc]# more fstab
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
/dev/sdc1 /home ext3 efaults 1 2
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
LABEL=/usr /usr ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/sdb1 /var ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/sda7 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0


CS

[Ivan Ferreira]

You need to reformat your swap partition with mkswap -L option.

The swap partition must not be used, uncomment the swap from fstab, set the label, add again, reboot and do the same for the other swap area. Or do everything from the rescue CD.

[Chris Swenson]

This worked. I did hit one hitch, I had already moved the var partiton once so an abandoned slice of the sda disk already had a label of /var. It pays to keep a rescue disk handy. I booted rescue and fixed the labeling up and mount the new and old disks fine.

Thanks
cs

[Chris Swenson]

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