Re: [SLE] Problems with initrd after mkinitrd

On Tuesday 27 December 2005 20:31, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> No, it is track, ie, cylinder. That doesn't imply that the disk are using
> CHS addressing, but only that he is partitioning using track numbers, as
> is usual in fdisk.

Hi Carlos,

As I'm sure you're aware ;-) roughly a minute after you posted this, Patrick
wrote that he meant "sector 2082" and not "cylinder." (I'm not convinced,
however, that /he's/ convinced, so I'm afraid we'll both have to stay
tuned...)

Also, did you know that fdisk can be used in units of 'cylinders' *or*
'sectors'... your choice! man fdisk ;-)

I don't know that Patrick was actually /using/ fdisk, only that sectors are a
natural metric for partitioning drives that use LBA.

> Also, I gather he is talking of mkinitrd images, ie, ramdisk images, not
> the disk cloning images. It is something different. The systems crash
> sometimes after changing the initrd image.

In retrospect, I can see how my choice of words might have confused you. Let
me clarify my understanding:

Patrick says he is experiencing two 'flavors' of boot failure:

- One, less frequent, is the failure of some of the cloned drives to boot
immediately after they've been created and installed. He is presently
overcoming this 'flavor' of boot failure by reinstalling Grub.

- The second 'flavor,' which is occurring more frequently, is a failure to
boot after modifying the normally running system and creating a new initrd
(with mkinitrd.) IOW, these cloned drives have /not/ failed to boot,
initially, and the systems have been running normally for some time. Then,
after installing updates, he's run mkinitrd and the systems suddenly fail to
boot. He is presently overcoming this 'flavor' by tarring up the drive
contents, repartitioning the drive and restoring the contents.

In both cases, the boot failures are occurring *only* on the drives that have
been cloned. He is not experiencing either type of boot failure in those
systems where the drives have been installed raw and the systems have been
built and upgraded from scratch.

Is the scope of his problem (and my comprehension of it) now clearer?

> I suggested that there could be a problem, in his case, when the image was
> placed above some track number, perhaps 1024, and he is testing if that
> hypothesis is correct by creating separate /boot partitions at low track
> numbers.

But he is building new systems using contemporary components that support
Logical Block Addressing. As I understand it, these systems should have no
difficulty booting from any location on a 40GB disk.

> The base for my idea is that grub and lilo have to use bios calls at first
> to read the disk, and the bios might have problems with those disks. Its a
> wild, educated guess ;-)

I agree that the BIOS limitation you're alluding to is still a common problem,
but I think it only concerns older hardware than what Patrick is dealing
with. I am increasingly confident that the error lies somewhere in the realm
of drive address calculations and/or translations.

That is /my/ educated guess. I am still thinking about ways to test the drives
for proof, though. Any ideas?

regards,

- Carl

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