RH5 issues accessing P2000 g3 SAS partition

[techux]

Hi guys.

We have a dl580 server with a sc08 SAS HBA, in the local disk we installed RHEL 5, in the p2000 we created a volume of  1.5 TB, during the installation I created a ext3 with mount point /var for this volume.... the "installation" finish and after the  restart the system start booting until I get this message:

fsck.ext3 unable to resolve 'label=var'

RH cant find the partition (it was /dev/sda in the installation)

the p2000 is connected to the server with 2 mini-sas cables,one from each controller to 2 ports of the SAS HBA..

the thing is, if I reinstall RH but instead of 1.5 TB, create /var with let say 200GB, there is not any problem, the system boot perfectly.

am I missing something? what could be wrong?

[Matti_Kurkela]

When you have a filesystem on a multipathed device, the system will see the filesystem label on two or more separate /dev/sd devices. They are actually multiple paths to the same storage volume, but fsck won't know that... and since it cannot figure out which one of the identically-labeled devices it should pick, it will fail the filesystem check operation.

As a workaround, you should boot to single user mode, edit /etc/fstab to refer to "/dev/sda" instead of "LABEL=var" for the /var filesystem, then the system should boot normally. At that point, you can start configuring dm-multipath. Once you've done so, you could change the /var device name in /etc/fstab to the appropriate multipath device name and reboot.

NOTE: If you are using external storage and multi-terabyte filesystems, I would really recommend using LVM... it will make any storage reconfiguration much easier. Linux LVM also uses UUIDs in the LVM volume headers to identify disk volumes instead of device names, so it will work robustly even if device names change as a result of storage reconfiguration.

[techux]

Thank you so much.It worked,

 I will check is the application devolepers dont any inconvenience with LVM..

now while system reboot (RHES 5.6) it show a message:

"root is on a multipathed device multipathd can not be stopped"

not sure if this is normal or if there is a fix for this. I am searching about..