[vox-tech] Puzzling Hard Drive Behavior -- ah HA!

[Richard S. Crawford]

SHOW AND TELL TIME:  Sort of...

I actually managed to catch many of the bootup messages as they were
flowing past on my screen while booting up.  As I mentioned, with the
drives both in place and jumpered properly (I quintuple-checked), BIOS
recognizes both drives and assigns them their slave/master status
appropriately.  Similarly, the kernel recognizes both hda and hdb as
it's booting up.

The problem is probably due to the fact that the drive I'm trying to
hook up has my old RH7.2 installation on it.  So while the kernel is
booting, I see this:

==============================
mounting root filesystem as read-write system:  [  OK  ]
mounting root filesystem as read-write system: LABEL / Duplicate
[ FAILED ]
==============================

So, what I think is happening is this: the kernel sees the root
filesystem on hda (labeled as "/") and mounts it r/w.  Then it sees the
root filesystem on hdb (also labeled as "/") and tries to mount that as
r/w, and fails -- because there is already a filesystem with that label
mounted as r/w.  Then it gets confused and bombs.

The fix for this -- Rod Roark suggested this to me, but I haven't had a
chance to try this -- is probably to adjust both fstab and grub.conf to
refer to actual partitions instead of labels.  fstab tries to mount
LABEL = / instead of /dev/hda3 for the root partition currently; I need
to fix that.

Once that's figured out, I still have to work out my fear of running
parted to set up my currently unmountable 60GB extended partition so
that I can partition out my system the way I want it.


 Mon, 2003-01-13 at 17:18, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> on Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 10:34:51AM -0800, Richard S. Crawford (rscrawford@mossroot.com) wrote:
> > On Sun, 2003-01-12 at 16:32, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> > > on Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 08:28:14AM -0800, Richard S. Crawford (rscrawford@mossroot.com) wrote:
> > > > > WD has separate jumper configurations for:
> > > > > 
> > > > >   - Master (single disk)
> > > > >   - Master (with slave disk)
> > > > >   - Slave (with master disk)
> > > > > 
> > > > > AFAIK, it is not possible to run WD drives as slave, without a master
> > > > > disk present.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Double-check your jumper settings on both the slave *and* the master
> > > > > drives.
> 
> > I think I've figured this one out... more details forthcoming...
> 
> Do share.  Similar problem's cropped up on the svlug list.
> 
> Peace.
-- 
--
Slainte,
Richard S. Crawford
AIM: Buffalo2K / Y!: rscrawford / ICQ: 11640404
http://www.mossroot.com http://www.stonegoose.com
"It is only with our heart that we can see clearly.  What is essential
is
invisible to the eye."  --Antoine de Saint Exupery