Greetings SL fans,

Sorry for the length of this post, but I'm hoping someone can come to my
rescue and want to provide sufficient context.

Recently I had a hard drive failure on a Sun X4600 box running SL4.8.
The box has four drives; the drive that failed was /boot (only). The
other three drives make up /dev/md0.

The /boot drive was not backed up (headsmack!).

I have created a rescue USB stick based on the System Rescue CD, which
boots via grub. I can boot the System Rescue CD successfully, and it
sees /dev/md0, which I can then mount and read from and write to.

I have attempted to create a kernel and initrd image to add to the USB
stick that will boot the box as if the kernel and initrd image were on
the failed (and now removed) boot drive.

I built the kernel and initrd image on a box similar to the box with the
failed hard drive. I replaced /etc/modprobe.conf with the file from the
target server, and then did 'yum install kernel-largesmp'. I copied all
the resulting kernel-related files from /boot to the USB stick, as well
as the appropriate directory from /lib/modules.

I then restored the helper box to its original state.

I booted the System Rescue CD on the target system and copied the
/lib/modules directory into place on /dev/md0. I fixed up grub/menu.lst
to have a stanza to boot the newly created SL4 kernel. I rebooted the
box, and everything seemed to be going swimmingly, until . . .

. . . the booted kernel seems unable to build /dev/md0 and the boot
process fails.

In the original configuration, the boot drive was /dev/sda, and the
drives making up the soft RAID partition were /dev/sdb, dev/sdc, and
/dev/sdd.

The System Rescue CD detects the USB stick as /dev/sda and the three SAS
drives as sdb, sdc, and sdd. All is well.

It's not clear to me what is going awry with the SL kernel, but as
the boot verbiage scrolls by, I see /dev/sdc referenced twice, and no
reference to /dev/sdd. When the kernel attempts to assemble /dev/md0, it
uses /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, and /dev/sdc and this fails and /dev/md0 cannot
be mounted and the kernel panics.

Help, please. Suggestions? Thanks.

BTW, I've put both SL4.8 Disc One, and the SL4.8 Live CD on a bootable
USB stick; both boot successfully, but I was unable to find a way to
make either one recognize /dev/md0, much less "rescue" me.

Cheers,
 Pann
-- 
Pann McCuaig <[log in to unmask]>                212-854-8689
Systems Coordinator, Economics Department, Columbia University
Department Computing Resources:
               http://www.columbia.edu/cu/economics/computing/