Bug#287415: mdadm: degraded md devices not assembled on boot

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Mau <mavog at hotmail.com> [2006.07.23.2202 +0100]:
> After some investigation - I'm a novice, remember! - I found that
> uuids were OK, superblocks also and so on: those error messages
> were printed only if assemblation were made early in initramfs, if
> I assembled the arrays when the box was started no errors messages
> were shown and everything ran fine.

Were the arrays still assembled properly? The reason I think you are
seeing these errors is because mdadm tries every drive for every
array and discards those with wrong UUIDs, so this behaviour is to
be expected, albeit not very nice, I agree.

> server, remove an entire drive, i.e. sdb, and reboot.
> 
> The boot process stopped when checkfs.sh attempted to check the md[1245]
> filesystems: "no such device". Also typing CONTROL+D to continue the
> boot process showed that mdadm could not assemble the devices. What
> surprised me was that I could assemble those devices manually by running
> i.e. mdadm -Av /dev/md2.

To debug this, I need more output. Specifically, I need to know
pretty much exactly what mdadm says during initramfs. To make your
life easier, try the following:

  boot with "break=mount" appended to the kernel command line
  when a shell appears, run the following (the leading dot is
  needed):
    . conf/initramfs.conf
    . scripts/functions
    scripts/local-top/udev_helper
    scripts/local-top/md

I hope I am remembering this correctly. Try it and lt me know.

-- 
 .''`.     martin f. krafft <madduck at debian.org>
: :'  :    proud Debian developer and author: http://debiansystem.info
`. `'`
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing a system
 
"on the other hand, with the advent of msvc 5, i can claim i use
 emacs because it's smaller and more efficient." :-)"
                                                    -- darin johnson
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