Re: latest current fails to mount root

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Tue, 1 Apr 2008 20:25:33 -0400 (EDT)
der Mouse <mouse%Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA@localhost> wrote:

> > I just rebuilt current for i386 and updated two notebooks.  One is
> > fine, and the other won't boot, failing to find the root partition.
> > (current from a week ok worked fine.)  It printed something about
> > mbr partition extending beyond physical disk size after the kernel
> > had probed devices, and was then in 'choose root device' mode.  I
> > couldn't find the msg in the source so will boot it again and get
> > the exact message.
> 
> I recently ran into what is very probably the same issue.  For reasons
> irrelevant here, I took a disk from a machine with a perfectly
> ordinary SCSI card, with a working install on it, and put it on a
> machine with a SCSI "hardware" (almost certainly really firmware)
> RAID card.  The RAID card saw the disk and (auto)configured it JBOD;
> the bootblocks worked and booted the kernel - but then the kernel
> whined about the MBR partition extending past the end of the drive (I
> don't recall the exact message, and some source grepping has failed
> to turn it up) and wouldn't let me specify anything on that disk as
> root.  Sounds very much like your symptoms.
> 
> I can understand a warning, but I think outright refusing to let
> someone even attempt to use the disk under these circumstances
> is...well, I'm having toruble calling it anything weaker than
> "broken".
> 
If he's seeing what I saw, he'd better not try to use the disk -- I
ended up scrambling my disk so badly I had use the Lenovo restore CDs,
which wipe everything from the fdisk partition on up.

In other words, the problem was that it really couldn't see most of the
disk, so it scribbled in bad places...


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb