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(tears remaining hair out)

Trying to setup Gentoo on a pair of IDE disks (hda / hdc), similar to
how I did it last year with the 2004.0 disks. Basically, both drives
are going to be partitioned as follows, with RAID1 for everything (even
the swap file).

/boot - 128MB (hda1/hdc1)
(swap) - 2GB (hda2/hdc2)
/ - 2GB (hda3/hdc3)
LVM partitions - rest of disk (hda4/hdc4)

However, things have changed slightly between last year's 2004.0 CD and
the 2005.0 CD (mostly having to do with the 2.6 kernel and changing to
UDev from DevFS?).

# modprobe md
# ls /dev/md*
ls: /dev/md*: No such file or directory
# for i in 0 1 2 3; do mknod /dev/md$i b 9 $i; done
# ls /dev/md*
/dev/md0 /dev/md1 /dev/md2 /dev/md3
# nano -w /etc/mdadm.conf

Contents of my mdadm.conf file:

DEVICE /dev/hda1 /dev/hda2 /dev/hda3 /dev/hda4
DEVICE /dev/hdc1 /dev/hdc2 /dev/hdc3 /dev/hdc4

ARRAY /dev/md0 devices=/dev/hda1,/dev/hdc1
ARRAY /dev/md1 devices=/dev/hda2,/dev/hdc2
ARRAY /dev/md2 devices=/dev/hda3,/dev/hdc3
ARRAY /dev/md3 devices=/dev/hda4,/dev/hdc4

Pretty generic... now to create the raid. This is where we hit our first
issue:

# modprobe raid1
# mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hda1 /dev/hdc1
mdadm: /dev/hda1 appears to contain an ext2fs file system
size=72192K mtime=Wed Mar 30 16:46:07 2005
mdadm: /dev/hdc1 appears to contain an ext2fs file system
size=72192K mtime=Wed Mar 30 16:46:07 2005
Continue creating array? y
mdadm: ADD_NEW_DISK for /dev/hda1 failed: Device or resource busy
#

Here are the problems:

1) Even though I have a 128MB partition for /boot, it is still showing
64MB from a previous partitioning scheme.

2) mdadm: ADD_NEW_DISK for /dev/hda1 failed: Device or resource busy

So... take a look at my partition list:

livecd root # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 76.8 GB, 76869918720 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 148945 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 249 125464+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hda2 250 4218 2000376 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hda3 4219 8187 2000376 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hda4 8188 148945 70942032 fd Linux raid autodetect

Disk /dev/hdc: 76.8 GB, 76869918720 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 148945 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdc1 * 1 249 125464+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hdc2 250 4218 2000376 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hdc3 4219 8187 2000376 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hdc4 8188 148945 70942032 fd Linux raid autodetect
livecd root #

All of which looks right and proper. I'm on about my 6th attempt now,
and I'm not sure why the 2004.0 CD worked last year, but the 2005.0 CD
is not working this year. (I had an identical configuration up and
running for most of last year.)

Thomas Harold wrote:

> All of which looks right and proper. I'm on about my 6th attempt now,
> and I'm not sure why the 2004.0 CD worked last year, but the 2005.0 CD
> is not working this year. (I had an identical configuration up and
> running for most of last year.)

Why reinstall from scratch? You know you get "2005.0" with ehlp of emerge?

J.O. Aho wrote:

> Thomas Harold wrote:
>
>> All of which looks right and proper. I'm on about my 6th attempt now,
>> and I'm not sure why the 2004.0 CD worked last year, but the 2005.0 CD
>> is not working this year. (I had an identical configuration up and
>> running for most of last year.)
>
>
> Why reinstall from scratch? You know you get "2005.0" with ehlp of emerge?

I had to reformat the old box for other projects late last year. So now
I'm attempting to get a new system up and running.

Follow up #1:

Seems like I'm getting the "bd_claim" error in md. Even on a fresh boot
after doing the fdisk, I'm still getting errors that /dev/hda1 is in
use. AFAIK, nothing should have touched the disks yet if I go straight
into creating the md[0-3] nodes and using mdadm to create the raid sets.

Old config:

Pri/M: 72GB HD
Pri/S: 80GB HD (removed this drive)
Sec/M: 72GB HD
Sec/S: CD-ROM

Even moving the 80GB slave off of that IDE chain doesn't fix the issue
with /dev/hda1 being in use.

Since I'm also seeing spurious error messages from mdamd about /dev/hda1
having a file system on it, I'm nuking the drives using Darik's Boot and
Nuke. Maybe the Gentoo 2005.0 Universal CD is attempting to mount
partitions that it thinks it understands.

Other things under consideration:

- it's an older motherboard (Gigabyte GA-6VA7+), maybe there's a bug in
the IDE chipset (or a setting that I've missed in the BIOS)

- user error... I thought I understood what's going on, but maybe I don't

- might try the 2004.0 CD again, since I know that worked last year

Thomas Harold wrote:
> Follow up #1:
>
> Seems like I'm getting the "bd_claim" error in md. Even on a fresh boot
> after doing the fdisk, I'm still getting errors that /dev/hda1 is in
> use. AFAIK, nothing should have touched the disks yet if I go straight
> into creating the md[0-3] nodes and using mdadm to create the raid sets.
>
> Old config:
>
> Pri/M: 72GB HD
> Pri/S: 80GB HD (removed this drive)
> Sec/M: 72GB HD
> Sec/S: CD-ROM
>
> Even moving the 80GB slave off of that IDE chain doesn't fix the issue
> with /dev/hda1 being in use.
>
> Since I'm also seeing spurious error messages from mdamd about /dev/hda1
> having a file system on it, I'm nuking the drives using Darik's Boot and
> Nuke. Maybe the Gentoo 2005.0 Universal CD is attempting to mount
> partitions that it thinks it understands.
>
> Other things under consideration:
>
> - it's an older motherboard (Gigabyte GA-6VA7+), maybe there's a bug in
> the IDE chipset (or a setting that I've missed in the BIOS)
>
> - user error... I thought I understood what's going on, but maybe I don't
>
> - might try the 2004.0 CD again, since I know that worked last year
Try
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512
and wait for it to finish. If you still have trouble, it could well be a
hardware problem.

Well, it's not the HDs. I just attempted the same thing, and am
getting the exact same error. 2005.0, chuff chuff chuff. I'm going
to try the 2004.3, and see if that works. If it does, well, time to
go and submit a bug.

nihilist wrote:

> Well, it's not the HDs. I just attempted the same thing, and am
> getting the exact same error. 2005.0, chuff chuff chuff. I'm going
> to try the 2004.3, and see if that works. If it does, well, time to
> go and submit a bug.
>

I finally pulled down 2004.3 and mdadm seems to work fine.

1) I nuked the drives (used dBaN), then partitioned using 2004.3:

128MB /dev/hda1 & /dev/hdc1 (boot)
2048MB /dev/hda2 & /dev/hdc2 (root)
2048MB /dev/hda3 & /dev/hdc3 (swap)
(rest) /dev/hda4 & /dev/hdc4 (user files)

2) Then I did the following:

# modprobe md
# ls /dev/md*
ls: /dev/md*: No such file or directory
# for i in 0 1 2 3; do mknod /dev/md$i b 9 $i; done
# ls /dev/md*
/dev/md0 /dev/md1 /dev/md2 /dev/md3

(As a side note, I'm not sure that I had to create the nodes by hand,
but I had issues with 2005.0 where the md[x] nodes weren't being created
automatically.)

# modprobe raid1
# mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hda1 /dev/hdc1
mdadm: array /dev/md0 started.
# mdadm --create /dev/md1 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hda2 /dev/hdc2
mdadm: array /dev/md1 started.
# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md1 : active raid1 hdc2[1] hda2[0]
2000256 blocks [2/2] [UU]
[==>..................] resync = 13.8% (277760/2000256) finish=3.6min
speed=7920K/sec
md0 : active raid1 hdc1[1] hda1[0]
125376 blocks [2/2] [UU]

unused devices: <none>

(I include the following lines for sake of completeness. I typically
wait until the resync has finished before firing off the next mdadm
command.)

# mdadm --create /dev/md2 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hda3 /dev/hdc3
# mdadm --create /dev/md3 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hda4 /dev/hdc4

At this point, I have to go back and read the documentation some more.
But at least 2004.3 mdadm doesn't throw the bd_claim error at me. I
don't have a lot of time to muck with 2005.0 this week to figure out why
it's dying, so I'm going to forge ahead with 2004.3 and get the box up
and running.

So anyway, it was like, 17:28 CEST Apr 19 2005, you know? Oh, and, yeah,
Thomas Harold was all like, "Dude,

[..]

> don't have a lot of time to muck with 2005.0 this week to figure out
> why it's dying, so I'm going to forge ahead with 2004.3 and get the
> box up and running.

There's really nothing preventing you from changing the profile from
2004.3 (which is deprecated by now) to 2005.0 once you've got the
system up and running using the 2004.3 install media.

Once you've done that, synced portage and updated, you've got yourself
a 2005.0 system, for all intents and purposes.

--
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. Perth ---> *
12:54:39 up 178 days, 20 min, 10 users, load average: 0.05, 0.05, 0.00
Linux 2.6.9 x86_64 GNU/Linux Registered Linux user #261729