CentOS - May 2009 - LVM, SATA controllers and BIOS devices

So I have an issue with CentOS 5.3 i386, LVM, and SATA.

Boot device is a 200GB ATA disk on hda2.

I've added a couple of disks with the on-the-mobo SATA controller ports
and grown the EXT3 fs with system-config-lvm.

Then, as an experiment, I added a PCI SATA controller and an additional
disk.  Ran system-config-lvm, added the new space to the existing
VolGroup00, and all was good.

Feeling confident, I shut the box down and plugged another disk in to
the PCI SATA controller.  On reboot, I was greeted with a kernel panic
since the OS could not find "really-long-label."  Removing the new
SATA
disk did not fix the issue.

Digging about a bit with the box booted from CD in rescue mode, it
appears that the LVM filesystem is intact, but the BIOS device letters
(sda, sdb, sdc, etc) are scrambled in the LVM configuration somehow.
After running "lvm pv<something>" I figured out that the BIOS
drive
letters currently assigned don't match what's in /etc/lvm/backup,
archive, and so on.

Obviously there's some way to read the VolGroup info from the disks,
since "linux rescue" can mount the volume VolGroup00.  I've tired
vgrestore, but I'm still getting a kernel panic on boot from disk.

What's the best way to get the LVM/BIOS config sorted out so that the
system can boot up?

Thanks for any hints.

--Chris

Chris Boyd wrote:
> So I have an issue with CentOS 5.3 i386, LVM, and SATA.
> 
> Boot device is a 200GB ATA disk on hda2.
> 
> I've added a couple of disks with the on-the-mobo SATA controller ports
> and grown the EXT3 fs with system-config-lvm.
> 
> Then, as an experiment, I added a PCI SATA controller and an additional
> disk.  Ran system-config-lvm, added the new space to the existing
> VolGroup00, and all was good.
> 
> Feeling confident, I shut the box down and plugged another disk in to
> the PCI SATA controller.  On reboot, I was greeted with a kernel panic
> since the OS could not find "really-long-label."  Removing the
new SATA
> disk did not fix the issue.
My guess would be that the driver for the new PCI card isn't part of the 
initrd.  If you don't have any data on the drive yet you could always 
reduce the vg so that it is no longer included.  You could also recreate 
your initrd to include the driver for the pci card.

-Shad