CentOS - Apr 2010 - Kernel panic due to vg00 not found while not using LVM at all

Hi,

I have a system running CentOS4.8.

Last month I installed the latest updates including kernel 2.6.9-89.0.23 
and rebooted the system. It has been running for almost a month.

Last night I updated the system again which updated only a few packages:
openssl, tzdata, curl,vixie-cron and logrotate.

No new kernel or anything out of ordinary. The reboot after the update 
stopped with kernel panic:

--<snip>--
Loading dm-snapshot.ko module
Making device-mapper control node
Scanning logical volumes
   Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
Activating logical volumes
Volume group vg00 not found
ERROR: /bin/lvm exited abnormaly!
Creating root device
--<snip>--
After that it's trying to mount root and it fails with kernel panic.

This system is using disk partitions. It's not using LVM.

I can boot in rescue mode and "chmod /mnt/sysimage". All partitons are
there and mountable. No fsck errors. I checked /boot/grub/grub.conf and 
it looks fine to me. The time stamp was from last month when I did the 
first update. Also there are no new files in /boot since the update from 
last month.

Why is it looking for logical volumes? Any idea?

Thanks
Peter

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 4:05 AM, Peter Blajev <pblajev at ucsd.edu>
wrote:
> After that it's trying to mount root and it fails with kernel panic.
>
> This system is using disk partitions. It's not using LVM.
>
> I can boot in rescue mode and "chmod /mnt/sysimage". All
partitons are
> there and mountable. No fsck errors. I checked /boot/grub/grub.conf and
> it looks fine to me. The time stamp was from last month when I did the
> first update. Also there are no new files in /boot since the update from
> last month.
>
> Why is it looking for logical volumes? Any idea?
Not certain, but maybe relabeling the volumes might help?  It
shouldn't make a difference if you're not using LVMs, but recently I
had a boot failure on a RedHat system that was resolved by using
e2label on all the disk partitions.