In my recent experiments with moving my home Debian desktop to RAID-1 arrays, I discovered that update-initramfs is producing intrd.img-* files which are unusable.* What I mean by that is this:

When I do update-initramfs -u (or -c), it produces a new initrd.img-2.6.32-5-amd64.* When I attempt to boot with the new file, I get the following:


Loading, please wait [long wait, and then:]
Gave up waiting for root device
...[some suggestions about looking at /proc/cmdline and /proc/modules]
Alert:* /dev/md3 does not exist!* Dropping to a shell!


[etc]

Note that /dev/md3 is the RAID-1 array which is mounted as / .*

When I replace the initrd.img-2.6.32-5-amd64 which was generated when I installed squeeze, the computer boots without any problems, informs me that /dev/md3 has been started with 2 drives, etc.


My /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf has MODULES=most, my /etc/initramfs-tools/modules has nothing enabled, and /etc/initramfs-tools/update-initramfs.conf has update-initramfs=yes and backup-initramfs=no.* My suspicion is that I need to add some modules to the modules file.* Is this correct?* If so, which ones do I need for a system running software RAID-1 configured with mdadm?


Thanks in advance,
-PT

Hi again --

Does anyone have any post-thanksgiving suggestions for how to handle this issue?*

Thanks in advance,
-PT

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Peter Tenenbaum <peter.g.tenenbaum@gmail.com> wrote:

In my recent experiments with moving my home Debian desktop to RAID-1 arrays, I discovered that update-initramfs is producing intrd.img-* files which are unusable.* What I mean by that is this:


When I do update-initramfs -u (or -c), it produces a new initrd.img-2.6.32-5-amd64.* When I attempt to boot with the new file, I get the following:


Loading, please wait [long wait, and then:]
Gave up waiting for root device
...[some suggestions about looking at /proc/cmdline and /proc/modules]
Alert:* /dev/md3 does not exist!* Dropping to a shell!



[etc]

Note that /dev/md3 is the RAID-1 array which is mounted as / .*

When I replace the initrd.img-2.6.32-5-amd64 which was generated when I installed squeeze, the computer boots without any problems, informs me that /dev/md3 has been started with 2 drives, etc.



My /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf has MODULES=most, my /etc/initramfs-tools/modules has nothing enabled, and /etc/initramfs-tools/update-initramfs.conf has update-initramfs=yes and backup-initramfs=no.* My suspicion is that I need to add some modules to the modules file.* Is this correct?* If so, which ones do I need for a system running software RAID-1 configured with mdadm?



Thanks in advance,
-PT