Linux system won't boot

[dogwomble]

Hey guiys,

My Linux system has decided to play silly buggers.

Upon normal bootup, everything starts OK. However, it stops at ""Loading dm-snapshot.ko modules"". And sits there. Forever.

I am able to sorta get into the box - I can go into grub and it will attempt to boot with different kernel options, but it still has a panic attack - however it will at least let me log in as root and check things out.

So where should I start poking?

[sagit]

dmesg | more

dm-snapshot.ko sounds like antivir (iirc). interested about the "snapshot" part. it may be taking a snapshot of your system or scanning all the files, thus a reason for the slowdown.

dmesg will show things as they load up. you should read this..and stop that poking around :p

[dogwomble]

Yes, but I would have thought that if it was a simple slowdown, it would have booted overnight :)

IIRC, it's part of devicemapper, which as I discovered the other night is used by Fedora Core for the RAID volume. It's interesting though ... the only reason that I can get in is because when I boot with the extra kernel options e2fsk complains about the RAID volume. However, reformatting it didn't fix the problem.

[ewe2]

So can you boot into your OS drive? sounds like you still don't have stable RAID support or your devicemapper config is hosed. RAID snapshot support is easy to misconfigure, I'd look over the config carefully.

[dogwomble]

Worked out the problem. It was the RAID card. Did a bit of testing with a tool Spingo suggested - everything works fine when the drives get treated independantly, but the second I put the RAID in, it's bad sector central...