Hello y'all,

I am temporarily stumped by this and thought I'd ask the group, in case 
there is anyone who has any suggestions.

I have a Red Hat 6.2 system with Linux 2.2.14 on it.  I wanted some device
stuff that is available on the 2.2.1[67] kernels from a 2.4 backport, so I
thought I'd install kernel 2.2.17 . 

Well, everything's fine except that my RAID filesystem will not start 
under 2.2.17 .  Everything else, including sound, networking, etc., works 
fine.  (I haven't gotten to test the new device drivers though because 
the RAID filesystem has my /home directory on it, which is important to me.)

The RAID personality I'm using is RAID0, striped.  The raid0.o module is
loaded.  The "/sbin/raidstart" command says this:

/dev/md0: Invalid argument

For more technical information, here is the full set of parameters etc. 
under 2.2.14 (under which the RAID works fine):

[15] root@niamey.ockers.net:/tmp > cat /etc/raidtab
raiddev             /dev/md0
raid-level                  0
nr-raid-disks               2
chunk-size                  64k
persistent-superblock       1
#nr-spare-disks     0
    device          /dev/hdc1
    raid-disk     0
    device          /dev/hdd1
    raid-disk     1

[16] root@niamey.ockers.net:/tmp > cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid0] 
read_ahead 1024 sectors
md0 : active raid0 hdd1[1] hdc1[0] 80035584 blocks 64k chunks
unused devices: <none>
[17] root@niamey.ockers.net:/tmp > lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by
raid0                   3036   1 
<deletia..>

Now, under 2.2.17, the /etc/raidtab hasn't changed, but /proc/mdstat says 
this:

[19] root@niamey.ockers.net:/tmp > cat /proc/mdstat 
Personalities : [2 raid0]
read_ahead not set
md0 : inactive
md1 : inactive
md2 : inactive
md3 : inactive

[22] root@niamey.ockers.net:/tmp > cat lsmod.2217 
Module                  Size  Used by
raid0                   2104   0  (unused)
<deletia..>

The "size" as reported by lsmod is smaller than it was under 2.2.14!!  The
following are the actual file sizes (and the 2.2.17 one is smaller):

[24] root@niamey.ockers.net:/lib/modules > find . -name 'raid0.o' -exec ls -l {} \;
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         5140 Mar  7  2000 ./2.2.14-5.0/block/raid0.o
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         3684 Oct 25 13:03 ./2.2.17/block/raid0.o

The module loads under 2.2.17 with no complains.  Nothing whatsoever is 
logged to syslog.

That "invalid argument" thing is getting me down.  The only time I've seen
it before is under Linux 2.0.x, when the actual RAID devices refused to
start themselves for mdrun, due to a corrupted RAID-5 array.  I ran ckraid
to rebuild the RAID array, and then mdrun would start the RAID stuff OK. 

--
Jim Ockers (ockers@ockers.net)                     Ask me about Linux!
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/

Fight Spam! Join CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email)
at http://www.cauce.org/ .