Error finding UUID after 4.0 SU2 update

[bigK2009]

Hello,

After upgrading one of our vsphere servers to 4.0 SU2 from 4.0 RTM it wouldn't boot all the way and was complaining about:

Cannot find device with UUID: UUID of disk.

I commented out the entry for the UUID in fstab. It was the UUID for the /var partition. After commenting it out and rebooting the server, it was able to boot up all the way. However the server was not working 100%. VCenter was complaining that the HA agent had something wrong and I couldn't SSH into the server either (normally I can). There were several errors complaining that it couldn't find things under /var/*.

I used both "ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid" and "blkid" to find out what the UUIDs for the disks are. The device with the UUID that vmware could not find was /dev/sdb6. I mounted it and was able to browse the directories. I verified that this was in fact /var. The weird thing is that the UUID in fstab matched correctly to the UUID for /dev/sdb6

So at this point I know that fstab is pointed to the correct UUID, but it still was not able to find the device when booting.....weird. I decided to change the entry in fstab from UUID=[UUID|http://communities.vmware.com/community-document-picker.jspa?communityID=&subject=UUID] to just /dev/sdb6 to see if that was the problem. After rebooting it correctly mounted the /var and all the services that were not working before were working again.

Also note that we use custom partitioning:

/

/swap

/var

/opt

My question is, why won't the UUID work in fstab anymore?

Sorry to be so long winded, maybe others are having this also.....thanks in advance!

Message was edited by: bigK2009

[chadwickking]

Is it possible that you could've labled your drives the same thing and didnt know it??

http://rubenerd.com/fedora-uuid-fstab/

Cheers,

Chad King

VCP-410 | Server+

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[chadwickking]

You sure you didnt lable the devices the same name??

http://rubenerd.com/fedora-uuid-fstab/

Cheers,

Chad King

VCP-410 | Server+

Twitter:

If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful

[bigK2009]

Thank you for the reply. I can't see anywhere where the disks are labeled the same (not sure how that would have happened anyways). Below is the output of ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid & what the fstab is showing.

The uuid that the server cannot find is "96e4449f-b173-4108-a8cd-c332cc206b7b", which translated to sdb6. In the fstab file, the old line "UUID=96e4449f-b173-4108-a8cd-c332cc206b7b /var" would not work. Replacing that with "/dev/sdb6" works.

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

total 0

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 18 18:34 1058f57b-0228-4e32-8f46-cd64a31b4ad6 -> ../../sdb5

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 18 18:34 2e903e2c-1713-421e-9ee3-3f7b5e64732a -> ../../sda1

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 18 18:34 617cd10f-86a9-4e54-81b0-b1d4a1781c38 -> ../../sdb1

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 18 18:34 96e4449f-b173-4108-a8cd-c332cc206b7b -> ../../sdb6

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 18 18:34 b9adce90-76fd-44b1-a210-1ef6fa8f1bd4 -> ../../sdb2

fstab

UUID=1058f57b-0228-4e32-8f46-cd64a31b4ad6 / ext3 defaults 1 1

UUID=2e903e2c-1713-421e-9ee3-3f7b5e64732a /boot ext3 defaults 1 2

None /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0

/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

UUID=b9adce90-76fd-44b1-a210-1ef6fa8f1bd4 /opt ext3 defaults 1 2

None /proc proc defaults 0 0

None /sys sysfs defaults 0 0

/dev/sdb6 /var ext3 defaults,errors=panic 1 2

UUID=617cd10f-86a9-4e54-81b0-b1d4a1781c38 swap swap defaults 0 0

I also used blkid to check all the sd* disks to see if they had the same UUID.....all were unique.

blkid /dev/sdb1

/dev/sdb1: TYPE="swap" UUID="617cd10f-86a9-4e54-81b0-b1d4a1781c38"

blkid /dev/sdb2

/dev/sdb2: UUID="b9adce90-76fd-44b1-a210-1ef6fa8f1bd4" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"

blkid /dev/sdb5

/dev/sdb5: LABEL="esx-root" UUID="1058f57b-0228-4e32-8f46-cd64a31b4ad6" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"

blkid /dev/sdb6

/dev/sdb6: UUID="96e4449f-b173-4108-a8cd-c332cc206b7b" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"

Let me know if there is anything else I can check.

[bigK2009]

Well this is strait from the horses mouth (VMware engineer that is....)........"This is a know issue with SU1 & SU2. Engineering is currently working on a fix for this but there is no ETA for the fix."

He also mentioned that this issue is very rare issue, but other customers have had the same problem. Since they don't have a solution I can only assume that this is an issue in 4.1 as well.

There were 2 solutions:

1. Use the device name in fstab - I chose not to do that

2. Reinstall the server from scratch - This is what I did.....I used 4.1 just for the heck of it.

I did ask if we could use disk labels, but he said that vmware would not support that.

[chadwickking]

did he reference a kb or anything at all? Odd...

CJK