Hi Chris. Just a few points and musings... may be helpful, may be not... On Wednesday 03 March 2004 17:54, Chris Evans wrote: > I thought I'd got this all cracked in the early hours of this > morning. I _think_ I'd been putting boot=/dev/hda1 when I tried to > write the revised lilo config to the MBR and perhaps that messed up > hdb. I don't know, anyway, I started again, did everything in that > howto pretty much to the letter and this time, after shifting boot to > /dev/hdc and rebooting, I could add /dev/hdb1. However, lilo would > not let me use a raid-extra-boot line and when I rebooted, the system > hung right at the start. Yeah I forgot to remind you to change hda [my setup] to hdb [yours]. I may have a partial solution for you... I tend to have BIG problems booting off anything but the first BIOS drive, maybe that's lilo, maybe that me not fully understanding lilo (or maybe a BIOS issue even). In any case, this leads to me _always_ having hda as bootdisk. So, when I built my raid0 sets I think I might have done it thusly: (1) Install your OS on hda Define raidtab: hda=failed-disk hdc=raid-disk; activate raid, format, cp data Mount /dev/md0 /mnt Change ONLY the fstab and lilo.conf on the mounted /dev/md0 volume: tell fstab to find / as /dev/md0 tell lilo.conf to boot off /dev/hda (!hdA! not hdc nor md0) Now when I would run 'lilo -r /mnt' it will complain "not on the first disk" or something like that... So instead, I do: Down system; swap over hda with hdc; boot (keep a bootfloppy around!!) run lilo (which must / should work now without complaining) add the (now free) hdc (which used to be hda) to your raid volume. (3) Profit ! ;-) I know, its a hassle, but maybe this does help you a bit though. Another possibility, but which requires changing your partitions: After some problems I decided it was simpler to just work around lilo problems by having a separate tiny non-raid /boot partition[*]. This has its drawbacks but it solves the lilo issues. The downside is that you must manually mirror /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdc1 [typically using dd], (also after a kernel upgrade!) and that when disk hda fails it will NOT boot from hdc by itself (it requires an admin with a boot/rescuefloppy physically at the console). If (big IF) you can live with that you may want to try it but be warned that it is somewhat of an ugly hack... [*] Note: I did this partly for raid but also partly for reiserfs. I thought it prudent to have a plain old ext2 /boot partition with the full kernel as opposed to needing an initrd with reiser support on a single reiserfs partition. YMMV... > I moved hdb1 to hda1 and started again, this time it's all worked > except for boot=/dev/md0 and the raid-extra-boot. Now lilo allows > these and says it's written to both MBRs, but when I reboot lilo gets > to the first twenty or so of the dots after "Loading Linux" and hangs > there ... resolutely. Weird... I have never seen that. "LI" and "LIL" errors, yeah, but not that. > A lot of pratting around with rescuing from the installation CD (must > work out how to burn a rescue boot CDROM) and I am back to being able > to get everything find if I boot from boot=/dev/hdc with > root=/dev/md0 ... and I think I'll give up here as I must go back to > doing my real job and having a life. If anyone can tell me what > might be neeeded (I haven't tried things like bios=0x80 lines) I may Hmm. Bugger... I'm no lilo expert (far from it in fact) but my understanding is / was that especially these lines are ESSENTIAL...! Why did you omit these lines... They are there for a reason. I hope you do find a solution... good luck! Maarten - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
