[GLLUG] Box won't boot

[David L Lambert]

I have a couple of Debian Stable systems,  one of which I use primarily 
as a fileserver.  The last time I rebooted (today,  as I anticipated a 
power outage that didn't actually happen),  it did not come up.  It 
timed out looking for the root device,  then dropped me into the 
"initrd" shell (BusyBox).  I was able to get it to finish booting by 
starting up "lvm", then giving the command "lvchange -a y 
/dev/{volume_group}/{root_volume}", then "quit", then "exit" ... but I 
don't thing I should have to do that!

I don't reboot this system every day;  in fact my current uptime was 
something like 45 days.  I guess I installed a new kernel, or core 
utility, or something,  and the installation didn't quite run right;  
any suggestions of what to try reinstalling?  I tried "update-initramfs 
-u" and then a reboot,  but still the same problem.

Or could it be that the LVM volume group is corrupted somehow?  It's 
only one PV,  an "extended" partition on a 750G EIDE disk:

# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 750.2 GB, 750156374016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000c9cd0

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          19      152586   83  Linux
/dev/sda2              20       91201   732419415    5  Extended
/dev/sda5              20         141      979933+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6             142       91201   731439418+  8e  Linux LVM
# df -h /boot
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             145M   32M  106M  24% /boot
# pvdisplay /dev/sda6
   --- Physical volume ---
   PV Name               /dev/sda6
   VG Name               vgScatha
   PV Size               697.55 GiB / not usable 314.50 KiB
   Allocatable           yes
   PE Size               4.00 MiB
   Total PE              178574
   Free PE               54111
   Allocated PE          124463
   PV UUID               ZnCTt7-MAOD-0xgx-MmIf-9bDW-QFO0-6VvHIz

I created a 199G LV last week, and extended another LV by a bit,  still 
have more than 200G unallocated in the VG.  Other than that,  I don't 
think I've changed the VG at all since the last reboot.  Any suggestions 
for what to check in this direction?

-- 
David Lee Lambert (also  davidleelambert at yahoo.com , lamber45 at msu.edu )
Member IEEE, ACM (david.lee.lambert at acm.org) - formerly as4109 at wayne.edu
Ph# (616)676-7375, LI profile http://www.linkedin.com/pub/david-lambert/12/831/26b
IM: davidleelambert (Yahoo!) or lamber45 at cse.msu.edu (MSN)

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