Hi, Gentoo! I've been in the wars.
It's so long since I've updated my system, many months, mainly because I got totally confused with changes to portage, and the mess that resulted from gnome 3 becoming stabilised, and hence my XFCE support being drastically undermined. However, it's still a working system, and I'm loathe to go messing around in it, considering how high the risk is of ending up with a non-working system. So, why not a new installation, in parallel with my existing one? Sounds like a good idea. So, I read up the new Gentoo handbook in the Gentoo wiki, downloaded the latest installation iso, and burnt it onto a re-recordable CD. I booted into this CD image, giving the kernel the "please enable LVM2" parameter, and played around with this, mounting various partitions, and generally checking I had access to all of them in this system. Everything seemed fine. Then I tried to boot back into my normal system. Kernel panic! The root file system, /dev/md6, was missing. (/dev/md6 is a software raid partition (RAID-1) built on /dev/sda6 and /dev/sdb6.) Luckily, the kernel messages detailing the RAID assembly were still visible. It appeared that the kernel had built /dev/md127 instead of /dev/md6. Several hours of lost sleep later, I managed to boot into an older kernel with a different root file system, and with the help of chroot was able, eventually, to access my /etc/lilo.conf, replace md6 by md127, re-run lilo, and boot "normally". So, what was it that chewed up my RAID configuration so badly that /dev/md6 got renamed to /dev/md127? Can I change it back to /dev/md6, somehow? Do I need to bother? How can I ever trust a Gentoo installation CD again? In fact, do I really need an installation CD for a new installation? Would I perhaps be better creating new partions then downloading a stage 3 from my working system? -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
