[Bug 174428] Re: Gutsy initramfs fails to boot from md partition

[Zds]

Ok, this goes now to wfm/wtf territory.

What I did was a clean reinstall of Gutsy. After reinstall the machine
booted just fine 2-3 times and then the bug appeared again - initramfs
failed to mount the root partition.

I now proceeded to do a clean reinstall of Gutsy *and wiped all the
partitions on the root md raid with /dev/zero*. This approach seems to
work this far, I managed to add all the md devices and the system still
boots.

So my educated guess is that some earlier version of md software has
written some magic bytes to some of the partitions so that the newer
versions of it, combined with Gutsy initramfs, could not cope with. This
sounds like a combined bug of md tools not upgrading all the metadata on
the md partitions during upgrade and initramfs dropping some legacy
support too early.

However, with the process described above I now again have a system that
can boot Gutsy kernels, so the problem is solved for me and thus I
propose this bug is marked resolved for now. If the bug comes again,
I'll get me more chicken blood and reopen this.

The md partition in question was rather old, preceeding the first Ubuntu
release, so there has been plenty of time for the md tools to make
incompatible changes to the magic data.

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Gutsy initramfs fails to boot from md partition
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/174428
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