[TriLUG] Initramfs

Brian McCullough bdmc at bdmcc-us.com
Thu Sep 3 16:49:21 EDT 2009


On Thu, Sep 03, 2009 at 01:55:25PM -0400, Cristóbal Palmer wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 10:48 PM, Brian McCullough<bdmc at bdmcc-us.com> wrote:
> > Folks,
> >
> > I recently installed a machine from scratch ( bare drives, used LVM ),
> > but didn't choose "Desktop" or "Web Server" or any of the "pre-defined"
> > packages, but just let it install the minimum defaults.
> >
> > When I boot the machine, ( and I have tried the installation a couple of
> > times ) I get it stalling in the middle of the boot process at an
> > "(initramfs)" prompt, where I need to "lvm vgscan" followed by "lvm
> > vgchange -a y" before it will successfully complete the boot.
> >
> 
> I think I've seen this recently. In my case it was grub not being
> installed properly. Easiest way to do things is to have an ext3 /boot
> directly on disk (not part of LVM), and then the rest of the disk(s)
> be LVM. Should work fine.

Thanks for the thought Cristobal, but that's how I have always done it.
As far as I know, Grub still isn't compatible with LVM.

No, the boot starts fine, the kernel loads and starts working its way
through starting up.  However, when it comes time to mount everything,
it stalls at the point I described, and I have to issue those two LVM
commands to get it to finish.  On other machines, those two commands
seem to automagically happen, and all of the LVM "partitions" mount
properly.

I _think_ it is part of the creation of the "initramfs" ( the initrd )
that accompanies the kernel, that must be failing, but I don't know what
to do to improve things, and none of my searching has shown any
practical results.


Brian





More information about the TriLUG mailing list