On 08/30/2010 09:24 PM, fred smith informed us: <snip>another curious thing I just noticed is this: the list of kernels available > at boot time (in the actual grub menu shown at boot) IS NOT THE SAME LIST > THAT APPEARS IN GRUB.CONF. in the boot-time menu, the kernel it boots is > the most recent one shown, and there are other older ones that do not > appear in grub.conf. while in grub.conf there are several newer ones that > do not appear on the boot-time grub menu. > > most strange. > > BTW, this is a raid-1 array using linux software raid, with two matching > drives. Is there possibly some way the two drives could have gotten out > of sync such that whichever one is the actual boot device has invalid > info in /boot? > > and while thinking along those lines, I see a number of mails in root's > mailbox from "md" notifying us of a degraded array. these all appear to have > happened, AFAICT, at system boot, over the last several months. > > also, /var/log/messages contains a bunch of stuff like the below, also > apparently at system boot, and I don't really know what it means, though > <snip> This is not the magic solution that you quite understandably would prefer. I hope someone can pinpoint your trouble. UNTIL THEN, I think you would be 'way ahead to make a full backup (or 2) to an external drive, disconnect that baby and start troubleshooting, confident that you won't lose all your data. I'll bet that #cat /proc/mdstat looks really scary. Mine looks like this: [root@madeleine grub]# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md0 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0] 409536 blocks [2/2] [UU] md2 : active raid1 sdb3[1] sda3[0] 3903680 blocks [2/2] [UU] md3 : active raid1 sdb4[1] sda4[0] 108502912 blocks [2/2] [UU] md1 : active raid1 sdb2[1] sda2[0] 375567488 blocks [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> [root@madeleine grub]# Other than that, the system boots from /boot/grub/grub.conf and that should be what you see during the boot process. The other two, /etc/grub.conf and /boot/grub/menu.lst are symlinks to the real deal It might be interesting to have a look at /etc/fstab then issue a mount command with no arguments to see if anything is mounted on /boot You might find valuable RAID 1 information at: http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-set-up-software-raid1-on-a-running-system-incl-grub-configuration-centos-5.3 HTH _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos