Booting SLES11SP1 aborts with waiting for device to appear

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1

Situation

Booting a SLES11SP1 with kernel version: 2.6.32.46-0.3-default stops with the following messages:

[...]
Kernel logging (ksyslog) stopped.
Kernel log daemon terminating.
Boot logging started on /dev/tty1(/dev/console) at Tue Nov 29 17:22:07 2011
Setup multipath devices: ok.
Trying manual resume from /dev/disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001030354546383346300d00-part2
Invoking userspace resume from /dev/disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001030354546383346300d00-part2
resume: libgcrypt version: 1.4.1
Trying manual resume from /dev/disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001030354546383346300d00-part2
Invoking in-kernel resume from /dev/disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001030354546383346300d00-part2
Waiting for device /dev/disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001030354546383346300d00-part3 to appear: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Could not find /dev/disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001030354546383346300d00-part3.
Want me to fall back to /dev/disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001030354546383346300d00-part3? (Y/n)
Waiting for device /dev/disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001030354546383346300d00-part3 to appear: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
not found -- exiting to /bin/sh

If the command "exit" is entered into the shell the system continues to boot.

Resolution

SLES11SP1 was installed on a system with local disks and access to SAN storage. While running mkinitrd multipath support was activated for the root device. Upon boot the kernel waits for multipath devices to come up even though the root device is already available.

Remove any multipath drivers (dm-multipath) from /etc/sysconfig/kernel, then run

mkinitrd

and make sure the feature multipath is not included. In case this installation was done on a EFI based system, please run elilo to reinstall the bootloader.

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