[NCLUG] Magic Boot CD?

[Marcio Luis Teixeira]

A funny story:

There's this one older Linux server that has been mocking me. I had used a IDE DVD-RW drive to install Fedore 10 off a DVD, but I wanted to replace that drive with an older CD-ROM drive, since this server was meant to sit in the corner anyway and it seemed like a waste of a perfectly good DVD-RW drive. So, I installed it the OS, then replaced the drive. But then I realized, much to my dismay, that the fresh Linux install would fail to boot, printing only:

Unable to access resume device (UUID=long string of crap I'm to lazy to type)
mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3: No such file or directory
sd 2:0:0:0 [sda] Attached SCSI disk
sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0

Put the old drive back in and it would boot fine. Eventually I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to boot off the drive I used to install the OS. No problem. Only that after successfully booting it many times, I decided to try yet another drive (wondering if it was a DVD vs. CD-ROM drive issue), and no. So, I put the "blessed" drive back in, the system fails to boot... With the good drive... Son of a gun! Was it the wrong drive, did I get confused? Am I going insane?

So, I repeated the install, and once again, it worked fine... Until it stopped working... WTF?

Well, to make a long story short, I I found out that this particular system boots fine if a non-bootable CD is in the drive, but it fails to boot if the drive is empty. What probably happened is that after doing the Linux install, I would put in a non-bootable software CD to install more stuff, and the system would work just fine *until* I removed that CD, at which point it would quit booting.

I'm half tempted to write "Do not remove, contains magic spell" on a blank CD and stick it in the drive, then use it that way. It'll be like my very own "magic switch" story:

  http://www.livingstonmt.com/access/dan/191magicswitch.html

Seriously, has anyone seen this sort of thing before? A few details: This particular box has an old 4-port 3ware IDE RAID PCI controller. Two IDE HD drives are both connected to the controller. The CD-ROM drive is the only thing connected to the integrated IDE controller on the mobo. The only other odd thing about this system is that I was unable to get Linux to boot at all with the default partitioning setup with the logical volumes and such. I had to remove those and make regular partitions like in the good ol' days.

-- Marcio