[coLinux-users] Block devices disappear

[Tyler L. <ty...@tl...>]

Everything worked great till I started screwing around with adding block 
devices getting ready to transfer everything to a disk partitions; now 
block devices--seemingly at random--aren't available on Linux boot. I 
haven't been able to figure out any consistent pattern to determine 
which block devices will be visible within Linux and which will be 
missing, but once a device disappears, it rarely reappears on subsequent 
boots. I don't believe that the swap image ever disappeared before I 
tried including disk partitions, but now it isn't even visible when I 
revert back to my original configuration.

By "not visible" I mean that the device doesn't show up in 
/proc/partitions. I've tried uninstalling and re-installing coLinux 
itself and the linux.sys driver (rebooting between uninstall and 
reinstall). I've tried booting with init=/bin/bash to make sure that the 
initscripts weren't messing anything up.

Host OS is Windows Vista, running on a Core2 Duo laptop. I think all the 
other information you need can be seen in the output below. Each of the 
"missing" block devices has successfully been mounted in coLinux at 
least once, but devices do "disappear" even if they've never been used 
before--i.e. if I create a new empty file then try to include it as a 
block device, it often will not be visible in Linux.

Below is an example of what I'm talking about. Notice that it 
successfully maps the devices before the kernel boots, but only cobd0 
appears in /proc/partitions. Let me know if there's any further 
debugging information I can supply.

Cheers
-Tyler

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C:\Program Files\coLinux>colinux-daemon.exe kernel=vmlinux 
cobd0=fedora7\Fedora-
7.img cobd1=fedora7\swap.img cobd2="\Device\Harddisk0\Partition3" 
cobd3="\Device
\Harddisk0\Partition4" mem=512 root=/dev/cobd0 ro -v 3 -t nt
Cooperative Linux Daemon, 0.7.2
Compiled on Jan 18 2008 21:47:09

using 'vmlinux' as kernel image
configuring 512 MB of virtual RAM
mapping cobd0 to \??\C:\Program Files\coLinux\fedora7\Fedora-7.img
mapping cobd1 to \??\C:\Program Files\coLinux\fedora7\swap.img
mapping cobd2 to \Device\Harddisk0\Partition3
mapping cobd3 to \Device\Harddisk0\Partition4
kernel boot parameters: 'root=/dev/cobd0 ro'
PID: 5096
colinux: launching console
colinux: booting
Linux version 2.6.22-co-0.7.2 (hn@hn-lt) (gcc version 4.1.2) #1 PREEMPT 
Fri Jan
18 21:44:04 UTC 2008
512MB LOWMEM available.
Entering add_active_range(0, 0, 131072) 0 entries of 256 used
Zone PFN ranges:
  DMA             0 ->        0
  Normal          0 ->   131072

...
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[root@colinux ~]$ cat /proc/partitions
major minor  #blocks  name

 117     0    4095968 cobd0
[root@colinux ~]$

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