I have an existing production server with three hard drives installed internally. The first drive is an IDE drive with the OS installed. There are two SATA drives attached to a Rosewill SATA controller in a PCI slot. Two partitions (sda1 and sdb1) are configured in a RAID 1 array. I have an external USB hard drive attached for backups. This device shows up as sdc and is mounted in fstab by the UUID. This system has been booting and running fine for some time. The Rosewill SATA controller also has two eSATA ports. I recently purchased a Rosewill 5 bay external enclosure. I installed three SATA drives in it. They appeared on the system as sdd, sde, and sdf. I created partitions and configured the drives in a RAID 5 array. Upon a reboot, I notice two issues. First, the Rosewill controller searches for external drives before the OS begins booting. This process takes a very long time to complete. The bigger issue is that when the OS does begin loading, a message appears on the console stating the system is waiting for the root operating system. If I power down the Rosewill external enclosure and reboot, the system comes up fine. I can then power on the enclosure and the array appears. However, I want a reboot to be an automatic process. Does anyone have an idea what is cause the system to hang during boot?
