Cannot Boot, RAID or settings?

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I’ve run into this twice now. When I boot, my computer falls into command line and gives an error message something like this (I’ve changed the things in [brackets]):

…cannot find dev/mapper/[random string of letters]part[some number].
Want me to fall back to dev/mapper/[same string of letters]partsame number?

I’ve tried y and n but they both take me to a very limited command line.

There are only two things I can think of. One, is I’ve changed the umask and dmask settings so root and user can edit files on Windows NTFS drives (which does not seem to be allowed for user by default). The other is, this computer had RAID at one point, but as far as I know it is not functioning. Anyway, posts I could find on “dev/mapper” seemed to mention RAID. My bet is that it’s the umask and dmask, because it wasn’t long after I changed those values that the problems started.

I suppose I may not be familiar enough with umask and dmask, but I don’t know why it wouldn’t let me boot. Any ways to install openSUSE 11.0 so I can boot and let the user access the Windows drives?

2

This line in /etc/fstab is all that is needed to mount an ntfs partition with read/write:

/dev/<partition>  /<mountpoint>  ntfs-3g   defaults   0 0

AFAIK /dev/mapper means that RAID (or possibly LVM?) is being used. If I’m not mistaken, grub cannot boot from a RAID volume because the driver is not yet loaded. If mirroring is being used though then grub can load the kernel from 1 of the mirrored drive/partitions using the standard naming convention, e.g., sda1. Check /boot/grub/device.map, /boot/grub/menu.lst, and /etc/fstab.