How do I disable multipath on Linux (RHEL 6) when it is on the root partition (/, /boot, /boot/efi, and swap)?

Question

I have been working on configuring multipath on a couple of RHEL 6 servers. Through some fault of my own (blacklist mistyped) I have configured multipath on the root partition, yet it seems that I am having trouble undoing that. The root partition is not on a SAN. It is a local, RAID 1 drive set.

Any help would be appreciated.

Steps taken:

Attempted to change to hard paths in fstab (sda1, etc) from UUID based paths. This brings up unbootable and in rescue mode. I didn't, however, alter the grub.conf with the same change, so I am wondering if that would do it?

Attempted to remove multipath entirely. Had to boot in rescue mode, start networking and reinstall.

Of course tried "multipath -F", but root is in use at the moment.

Haven't tried any of the above with the rescue disk, as this is a remote system and loading a cd isn't that easy, but I can manage getting it done if that is the only option.

Solution

I suggest making sure your root device is explicitly excluded from multipath.conf and then rebuilding your initial ramdisk without multipath support:

dracut --force -v --omit multipath

disable multipathd with chkconfig, reboot and see if that has fixed your rootfs (and /boot etc). If it has, re-enable multipathd and restart.

Comments

[Jaspreet Singh]

Perfect. I had tried blacklisting the module, but I guess that doesn't really do enough to disable it.