From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050324 Firefox/1.0.2 Red Hat/1.0.2-1.4.1.centos4

Description of problem:
I had some grief with system that installs OK, can be accessed using rescue mode, but doesn't want to boot.  At the end, it appers to be problem that disks not used during intallation (but present in the system) might have had some LVM metadata and file system labels on them that Anaconda hasn't detected (and/or has ignored).  Usually, Anaconda will detect existing file system labels, and will create "uniqe" labels for new file systems (for example, /boot would be labeled as "/boot1" if some pre-existing file system already had "/boot" label).  In this case, it didn't do it.  One probable cause was that partition that had pre-existing "/boot" label did not cotain actual file system (it was LVM physical volume).

I've included the relevant disk configuration information, and steps I needed to do to make machine bootable.

BTW, it would save me some grief (in this case, and when moving disks from one system to another for example) if file system labels were random strings, instead of being something with high probability of not being uniqe (such as mount point name).

Configuration:

I2O RAID controller with two volumes.  First RAID volume is used for the
system.  Second RAID volume is used for some data storage.  Since kernel
assigns them different device names during installation, and when the
system is booted from the disk after installation, I'll call them
"system RAID volume" and "data RAID volume".  When I reference device
names, it is just a reference as what name system saw them in particular
step.

During installation, i2o device drivers report the volumes in expected
order.  /dev/i2o/hda is the system RAID volume, /dev/i2o/hdb is the data
RAID volume.  Exactly the order they are defined in I2O BIOS.  hdb is
not touched by installation process and it contained single partition
hdb1.  /boot is installed on hda1 and "/boot" file system label written
onto it.  hda2 is configured as LVM physical volume with the rest of the
system (including root partition).

After the installation is done, and system reboots, for whatever strange
reason data RAID volume is detected as /dev/i2o/hda, and system RAID
volume as /dev/i2o/hdb.  This should theoretically work fine since
device names are never used as-is in system's configuration.  However,
the disks in data RAID volume were previously used (they were not
clean), and since system detected them first, this was the root of the
problem.  It seems that those disks had (once apon a time) system on
them, and set of LVM volumes defined, so that was used instead of the
"real" information from first RAID volume.  I'm not sure if disks were
used connected to this I2O controller, or if they were used somewhere
else and it just appeared that this information fell into the "right"
spot when RAID volume was assembled.

OK, so I wiped all partitions from data RAID volume.  This time system
actually boots (because it can see only partitions on system RAID volume
that it detected as /dev/i2o/hdb, so it reads correct LVM information).
But the story does not end here.

I created single partition on data RAID volume (/dev/i2o/hda), defined
it as LVM physical volume, and created new volume group with single
logical volume on it.  Created file system, mounted it, updated fstab.
So far so good.  Reboot.  Ups, the system doesn't boot, and complains
about duplicate "/boot" labels.  Back into the rescue mode.  And sure
there it was.  e2label reports that first partition on data RAID volume
(which is of type LVM and contains LVM physical volume) and first
partition on system RAID volume (which is of type Linux native and
contains ext3 file system) both have label "/boot".  Ooops.

Apperently, Anaconda was smart enough to ignore the label on something
that was not an file system.  Whatever goes on during "real" boot wasn't
that smart.

Used e2label to wipe out the label from data RAID volume.  This time
system booted, no problems at all.  For good measure I wiped out logical
volume/group and physical volume from data RAID volume and recreated
them (didn't wanted to risk e2label used on something that is not file
system screw some metadata for LVM).  All is happy now.

It could have saved me tons of time and grief if Anaconda checked during
install process (and detected) conflicting LVM information and
conflicting file system labels.  Or if file system labels were randomly
generated (insted of using mount point names), like the labels usded by
MD and LVM drivers.

Hopefully this info will be usefull to somebody in the future.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. requires specific environment


Additional info: