[SOLVED] Cannot make grub2 boot software raid (err...)

[spiff]

Hello all,

I have been googling and searching these forums for 5 hours now, and have found a lot of posts regarding problems similar to mine, but not quite the same, and no solution so far.

I have a Dell PowerEdge SC1425 with two SCSI-disks, that I have tried installing Debian Squeeze on. This machine has previously been running Lenny (with grub 1), and the upgrade was done by booting a live-cd, mounting the root partition and moving everything in / to /oldroot/, then booting the netinstall (from USB), selecting expert install and setting up everything (not formatting the partition). Both disks have identical partition tables:

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/dev/sda1               1           7       56196   de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2               8         250     1951897+  fd  Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sda3   *         251        9726    76115970   fd  Linux raid autodetect

/dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 contain a Dell Utility, that I have left in place.
/dev/sda2 and /dev/sdb2 are members of a Raid-1 for swap.
/dev/sda3 and /dev/sdb3 are members of a Raid-1 for / formatted with reiserfs.

After installation, grub loads, but fails with the following message:

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GRUB loading.
Welcome to GRUB!

error: no such disk.
Entering rescue mode...
grub rescue>

Doing "ls" shows:
(md0) (hd0) (hd0,msdos3) (hd0,msdos2) (hd0,msdos1)

I can do the following to get grub to boot:

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set root=(hd0,3)
set prefix=(hd0,3)/boot/grub
insmod normal
normal

This will bring me to the grub menu, and the system boots.

It appears that grub has only found md0, which I believe is the swap partition, because ls (md0)/ returns error: unknown filesystem.

I have installed grub to both sda, sdb and md1, and tried dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc and dpkg-reconfigure mdadm, as well as update-grub. I manually added
(md1) /dev/md1
to /boot/grub/device.map, but still no result.

I have run the boot_info_script.sh, but unfortunately I cannot attach the RESULTS.txt, because the forum aparently does not allow the txt-extension. Instead I have placed it here:
http://symlink.dk/stuff/RESULTS.txt

I am tempted to go back to grub-legacy, but it seems I am quite close to getting the system working with grub2. Any suggestions are welcome.

[sjukfan]

I'm only dabbling at this myself but I think I read somewhere that md0 needs to be the boot partition for grub2 to be able to load it.

[kiyop]

Did you post almost the same post in this forum recently?

I am confused because I think I posted something for similar question.

Why do you want to use reiserfs?
I wonder if core.img after MBR corrctly include the module reiserfs.mod.

grub> insmod reiserfs

"grub-mkimage" with "reiserfs"

If ls at grub command line does not give "(md1)" but gives "(md0)",

I'm only dabbling at this myself but I think I read somewhere that md0 needs to be the boot partition for grub2 to be able to load it.

seems good.

[spiff]

Did you post almost the same post in this forum recently?

I did not. I found a similar post, but not quite the same, and no workable solution.

Why do you want to use reiserfs?

There are various reasons, but the most important one right now is that I do not want to format the filesystem. I already have some data and configuration in place, that I simply moved to /oldroot before starting the installer.

I wonder if core.img after MBR corrctly include the module reiserfs.mod.

grub> insmod reiserfs

I think it loads the reiserfs module OK, but I will try it tonight.

"grub-mkimage" with "reiserfs"

I will investigate a bit further.

If ls at grub command line does not give "(md1)" but gives "(md0)",

I'm only dabbling at this myself but I think I read somewhere that md0 needs to be the boot partition for grub2 to be able to load it.

seems good.

Hmm. If anyone has a pointer to that statement, I would like to see it.

And also, how do I change the raid device names now, when the raids already exist?

[spiff]

I wonder if core.img after MBR corrctly include the module reiserfs.mod.

grub> insmod reiserfs

"grub-mkimage" with "reiserfs"

Come to think of it, my grub2 installation must be supporting reiserfs, because as I
wrote earlier, I can change the root and prefix variables to load the remaining
parts from one of the raid members (rather than the raid itself), and then everything
works fine.

[spiff]

I never found a way to make this work, so I ended up installing grub-legacy, which was not without problems, but at least I know how to work around the quirks of the old grub when installing on a software raid-1. I would still love to find out what I should do differently to make grub2 work the way I want, but for now I'm sticking with what I know works.

[smallchange]

Was you r grub.cfg loading both raid.mod and mdraid.mod?