RE: 2.5.69 won't mount root on md device

[Cress, Andrew R]

There were some disk firmware updates for the IBM "DeathStar" drives (to
version A5BA/A6BA) that may prolong its life a bit, but over a sample of
about 20 drives, I still saw 80% fail within the first 18 months.  Hopefully
you didn't spend much on them ;-).  

Andy

-----Original Message-----
From: Julien Oster [mailto:[e-mail]] 
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 6:02 PM
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: 2.5.69 won't mount root on md device

Christoph Hellwig <[e-mail]> writes:

Hello Christoph,

>> can't mount root filesystem "901" or "/dev/md1"
>> .config included. Any suggestions?

> You are using devfs so you need to tell your kernel the devfs name
> of the root device, /dev/md/1.  Or even better just turn devfs off.

Thanks, that did work out. I was confused, since the kernel also told
me the major and minor device number and so I thought it already
knows which device to mount.

But now another problem shows up:

May 22 23:34:01 frodo kernel: ide_dmaq_intr: stat=42, not expected
May 22 23:34:01 frodo kernel: ide_dmaq_intr: stat=40, not expected
May 22 23:34:01 frodo last message repeated 34 times

I get these messages from the kernel *a lot*, as you can see on the
repeat line. It's mostly stat=40, sometimes stat=42.

My two disks are attached to the onboard Promise RAID Controller (I
use it only as an IDE controller, not for RAID - Linux SoftRAID seems
faster).

I included my "lspci -v" output so you can read out the exact
mainboard and IDE/RAID controller chipset.

For my harddrives, here's a snipplet from hdparm -i /dev/hd[ac]:

 Model=IC35L080AVVA07-0, FwRev=VA4OA52A, SerialNo=VNC402A4CMNT6A
 Model=IC35L080AVVA07-0, FwRev=VA4OA52A, SerialNo=VNC402A4L7D3XA

(Yes, two identical IBM Deskstars with 80GB - those IBM beasts that
tend to complete crash unrecoverably after some months, that's why I
have two of them on a RAID 1)

Regards,
Julien