1:59pm Jack Neely said: > On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 11:36:06AM -0500, seth vidal wrote: > > On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 11:31 -0500, Jack Neely wrote: > > > Folks, > > > > > > I've run into something odd, and a way to repair the damage, but was > > > hoping someone could shed some light on what's actually happening. > > > > > > We've stabilized on RHEL 4.4 for the time being. I have had several > > > reports of folks installing a RAID 1 system with /boot mirrored and > > > complained that Grub hangs or otherwise wont boot the system. I've done > > > this a lot and it always works for me. > > > > > > Until I installed a new Dell 1950. Grub tries to load stage 1.5 and > > > runs off into random data land. > > > > > > I used a Grub CD and > > > > > > root (hd0,0) > > > setup (hd0) > > > > > > if I was lucky, I would get different random data. However, when I used > > > my grub CD and the configfile option to bring up the system proper I can > > > run a grub shell from the system and do this: > > > > > > device (hd0) /dev/sda > > > root (hd0,0) > > > setup (hd0) > > > > > > I reboot the system and it works like a champ. > > > > > > Try to install Grub again using the first method with the grub CD and we > > > are back to random data land. > > > > > > What's happening here? Is this #217176? > > > > I've got a number of 1950s installed with /boot on sw-raid1. No problems > > so far. Have you been able to verify this on multiple 1950s? Could it > > just be this one? > > > > -sv > > > > I'm very lucky to have gotten this one...so I don't have other 1950s to > test with. Mind if I come pick up a few more? > > What really makes me scratch my head is why my grub cd doesn't fix the > MBR properly the first time around. It is a newer version of grub than > what's in RHEL 4. *shrug* > Seth, have you ever tried booting from the second disk? I've seen this intermittently since forever... But have not yet come up with a clear answer/solution: http://bugzilla.redhat.com/168660 As you can see from my comments, there's an ugly hack if you are installing with kickstart. And to be safe, I also always run something like this post-install: # dd if=/dev/sda count=1 |strings |grep GRUB 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 512 bytes (512 B) copied, 4.3e-05 seconds, 11.9 MB/s GRUB # dd if=/dev/sdd count=1 |strings |grep GRUB 1+0 records in 1+0 records out GRUB 512 bytes (512 B) copied, 3.7e-05 seconds, 13.8 MB/s It's not perfect. But it does catch the times when the second disk never caugh the proper MBR. As no GRUB would appear. When this happens, I *have* seen anaconda/grub fail with the "error 16" on the debugging tty. If both disks were zeros before the install, then I can rest assured the second disk will still be bootable in a few years when the primary fails while I'm up in the mountains skiing or whatever... :-/ ../C
