RAID related bug: Freshly installed OpenSuse 13.1 hangs at booting (fix included)

English Install/Boot/Login
1

If you set up OpenSuse 13.1 using a named software RAID volume as root volume, it will hang and lock up when Yast reboots (usually after the online update).

If one presses ESC to see the console output, one can notice that the boot fails with this message:

[DEPEND] 'Dependency failed for Local File Systems'

After this message, the system spams you with the suggestion to log in and do a “journalctl -xb” to analyze the problem.
But as it only responds to the reset button, you can neither log in nor finish the installation, as it gets stuck the same way at the next boot.

To get around this bug you have to do these steps:

  1. Boot the rescue system from the install DVD.

  2. After logging in as root, enter the following command:

ls -l /dev/md*

Now you know which md device is your root filesystem.

2a. If you aren’t sure which one is the root filesystem, examine each of the md volumes by

mdadm --detail /dev/mdXXX

for each of the md device numbers which are counting down from 127, by replacing XXX with the md number.

  1. Mount the root filesystem using
mount /dev/mdXXX /mnt

(Insert the md number of the root filesystem for XXX.)

  1. Fix the problem by entering
mdadm -Es >> /mnt/etc/mdadm.conf
  1. Reboot:
reboot
  1. Continue and finish installation.

This is an old bug of the 13.1 RC install scripts which made it into the final release.
See http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-bugs/2013-11/msg01501.html
Apparently many people ran into this problem, and end up not using RAID, at least not for the root filesystem, or even switch to another distro.
So I hope this post helps others who stumble into that issue too.

2

I don’t see an edit button, so I have to add a new post for some more information I forgot in the original post:

At stage 2 / 2a you might also want to enter

fdisk -l

to get more detailed information about the disks/raids/filesystems.

3

On 2014-02-18 14:26, Brotzkocken wrote:
> So I hope this post helps others who stumble into that issue too.

Hi,

as this is not a request for help, but a solution, I think it would be
best to post it on the howto forum. Well, the submissions one. Fewer
posts, easier to find solutions and howtos.

You can request a moderator to move your post using the triangle report
button below.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.

(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))

4

You’re good.
You should use another nickname than Kotzbrocken - or was it Botzkrocken ? :wink:

Just don’t do that.
Do you dislike openSUSE ?

Yours
Mike