Opensuse 11.0 doesn't wait long enough for disks on boot

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi. I am having a real problem with OpenSUSE 11.0 on a system with about 20 SATA disks on it and using software raid.

The issue is that the disks are hooked through port multipliers, and the Eh code that inits the disks and spins them up takes awhile to get through.

It appears that OpenSUSE 11.0 waits for all the disk activity to settle down before moving on in the boot process to try and fire up the software raid and then lvm, but isn’t waiting long enough, as when it tries to bring up the raid sets the disks’ EH process is still going on on, so the raid assembly fails, the lvm fails, and then prompts the user to login and fix the disks.

I can do this manually and then go to multiuser, but it means the system can’t effectively boot unattended, which is a big problem.

Is there some delay builtin somewhere that I can adjust so it waits longer for all the sata code to find all the disks?

thx
mike

2

don’t really know the answer as I have never used raid
but I could suggest a look at folder: /etc/sysconfig

or look thru the various option in Yast, system, /etc/sysconfig Editor

3

Hi,

What about passing the parameter slow_boot=1 to the kernel?

It will make the boot process (via init in ramdisk) introduce some wait states before mounting the real root device.

Try it, it could help.

Regards.

4

Thanks. Root and /usr are not on the raid volume and come up just fine. It’s just the system thinks the disks are all done being configured and then goes to run the boot.mdadm and boot.lvm start ups. I’m trying to figure out how the system knows the disk setup is done before moving on, as there is some timer there or some state change that is being watched for that needs to be adjusted…

Any other ideas?

thx
mike

5

I think @caf4926 may be right; the settings are in the files mdadm or dmraid. The YaST Sysconfig Editor has them under File Systems.