md3 and lvms not there, boot from cd, they appear

[cheexo]

Hi,

first off, this isn't a matter of an unloaded module. It feels like a kernel problem, but It's not obvious to me what it is.

Here's the setup.

My goal is to NOT use evms, but DO use kernel 1.4. I have not at all been impressed with evms, and since md and lvm together does exactly what I want it to do and I know it well, I want to keep using them.
I can get into why I do not like evms, but to each his own.
My goal is to use md and lvm with 1.4-rc2. Simple.

Since the live cd for 1.4-rc2 basically forces you to use evms, I have been booting off of a 1.2 cd and going though the install, but pulling down the 1.4-rc2 stage3 tarball instead of the 1.2*

Start off by partitioning my 2 drives identically, creating raid1 md0-3 for hd*1-4. No problem.

Then on md3 which is the raid1 of hda4 and hdc4, I create a volume group called md3_vg with some logical volumes on that (usr_lv, var_lv etc.)

Ok? Fine. I make my reiserfs filesystem on my md0 (boot) md2 (root) and then on my logical volumes that live on md3_vg.

Ok. I do my install and everything goes just peachy. I build raid1 into the kernel, leave lvm as a mod. Leave out all evms crap Neet....
Untill reboot.

Now the problem is this.
When take the cd out and reboot, I get "could not mount some local filesystems".

Ok, so I look into this and I find that md3 and the associated volumegroup and logical volumes are gone. As in no trace of them.

cat /proc/mdstat shows md0 md1 and md2(swap) but no md3 at all. No /dev/md3_vg (nor any /dev/evms/anything obviously) dmesg is mum on md3.
Nada. No way no how.

But wait! If I put the 1.2 cd back in, viola. Everything is right where it should be. If I put the 1.4 cd in and boot off of that, everything is where it should be in /dev/evms. Take them back out boot off the hard drive, nothing.

Other things I have tried (not necessarily in this order) are: wiping the drives clean (with dd) and starting over; building lvm in to the kernel; using vanilla-sources and working from the groung up; stripping down, drenching myself in pigs blood, building a small fire out of chicken feathers while sprinkling cayanne pepper in the floppy drive and singing 16 verses of she'll be comin round the mountain (which almost got me fired untill I explained what it was for).

The basic question in my mind is: Why does booting off of the cd images work but booting off of my hardware does not.

Any insight would be welcomed. Of course there are more details to the story, but I'll wait untill somebody actually reads this and replys before I get deeper.

Thanks

Cheexo