From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6 Description of problem: On an otherwise stock/updated Redhat 9 Linux box (only packages necessary for the new kernel were applied), the 2.6.0-0.test1.1.26 kernel fails mounting root read-only and panics without the initrd. The root partition is mounted from a raid5 md device. The notes mention LVM not working; does this apply also to normal md devices? RAID autodetection appeared to work fine. Just mounting the RAID device failed. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.0-0.test1.1.26 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. setup raid5 root partition 2. boot into kernel-2.6.0-0.test1.1.26 3. Actual Results: Kernel panics after being unable to find initrd file on unmounted root partition. Expected Results: Kernel loads successfully. Problems with 2.4 kernel are no more! Additional info: RAID5 setup is across 16 drives on two 3ware Escalade 8500 controllers. Rebooting machine into 2.4.20-19.9 works fine, so no corruption on the drives or RAID setup itself.
Okay, after some more work with this, I discovered the problem. In the initrd, the linuxrc has this line: mount -o defaults,noatime --ro -t ext3 /dev/root /sysroot For some reason, that didn't mount root. I changed that line to this: mount -o defaults,noatime --ro -t ext3 /dev/md1 /sysroot The system came up cleanly, except for some USB errors already reported by other people in other bugs. I'm not sure why it didn't map correctly. For reference, here are copies of my grub.conf and fstab. Yes, we are running with no swap. grub.conf: default=3 timeout=10 splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz title Red Hat Linux (2.6.0-0.test1.1.26) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.0-0.test1.1.26 vga=ask ro root=/dev/md1 initrd /initrd-2.6.0-0.test1.1.26.img title Red Hat Linux (2.6.0-0.test1.1.26smp) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.0-0.test1.1.26smp vga=ask ro root=/dev/md1 initrd /initrd-2.6.0-0.test1.1.26smp.img title Red Hat Linux (2.4.20-19.9) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-19.9 ro root=/dev/md1 initrd /initrd-2.4.20-19.9.img title Red Hat Linux (2.4.20-19.9smp) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-19.9smp ro root=/dev/md1 initrd /initrd-2.4.20-19.9smp.img fstab: /dev/md1 / ext3 defaults,noatime 1 1 /dev/md0 /boot ext3 defaults 1 2 none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 /dev/md7 /news ext3 defaults,noatime 1 2 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 /dev/md2 /usr ext3 defaults,noatime 1 2 /dev/md3 /var ext3 defaults,noatime 1 2 #/dev/md4 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
This can be fixed by using root=(major)(minor) of the RAID device (without hacking the linuxrc in the initrd image). So, for /dev/md1, it would be root=0901.
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/