Can't mount local disk

[weisstik]

Hello together,

i have a problem concerning the mount process at startup.

My system, a RHEL 4 update 5 box, is installed on SAN disks. I have installed a Smart Array controller and added a few disks.

When the server starts up it always returns an error concerning the smart array volume group.

I have uncommented the "wrong" entry in the fstab file and the server starts up fine.

I had to activate the volume group manually

vgchange -a y volumegrp_name

After that I was able to mount the filesystem without any problems.

Does anybody know if it takes longer to mount or activate the VG's on the smart array? I guess that the error occurs due to this configuration.

Thank you in advance.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

First lets slowly diagnose the problem.

fdisk -l

What do you see? Is something missing.

Quick solution:
You may need to do a new ramdisk image mkinitrd due to an LVM bug in this version of Red Hat Linux.

SEP

[Wilfred Chau_1]

Did you define a volume_list in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf?

[weisstik]

Hello,

no, I havent defined a volume list and the partition is available.

If I mentioned before, I have no problems to mount the filesystem after startup.

At the startup the volume group isn't activated and so the mount process fails.

Thanks.

[Jimmy Vance · Accepted solution]

If I'm reading your post correctly, you were originally booting from SAN and then installed a Smart Array controller. If this is the case, then your initrd image probably doen't have the cciss driver needed for the Smart Array controller during boot.

Create a new initrd image that includes the cciss driver

[weisstik]

Hello,

I think that this will solve the problem :-)

Thank you all!