[TriLUG] Problems with debian software raid install.

[William Sutton]

did you toggle your raid boot partition to bootable?

William Sutton


On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, David A. Cafaro wrote:

> Hmm, that doesn't seem to be the problem I'm having.  Everything
> seems to have gone smoothly, no complaints about partition or file
> system creation.  And it does actually create the raid system and
> install all the software as requested (and confirmed using the Fedora
> rescue CD).  It just won't boot.  Thanks though.
>
> -David
>
>
> On Oct 8, 2007, at 2:11 PM, William Sutton wrote:
>
>> I have Etch running on a pair of PATA drives using RAID1.  The Etch
>> installer (or I) seem to have issues creating layered filesystem types
>> (e.g., ext3 on lvm on raid).  My recollection of what I had to do was
>> this:
>> - create the raid filesystem
>> - instruct the installer to continue (to force it to actually write
>> the fs
>> information)
>> - the installer would determine (after creating the raid fs) that it
>> didn't have an fs it could write to and bump you back to the fs
>> creation
>> part of the installer
>> - then select the newly created raid partitions for your new fs's, set
>> things as you want, lather, rinse, repeat until you have your
>> filesystems
>> the way you want
>>
>> it's a bit of a pain...either I'm doing something wrong or (I
>> think) the
>> etch installer fs creation code needs fixing
>>
>> William Sutton
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, David A. Cafaro wrote:
>>
>>> Ok, I need some help.  I'm normally a RedHat/CentOS/Fedora person,
>>> but for this project I needed to go with Debian.  One requirements is
>>> that the two 160GB hardrives be setup to provide software raid.  No
>>> problem the Debian installer seems to handle that no problem and I'm
>>> able to setup everything how I would like:
>>>
>>> /dev/hda1 108GB raid1 bootable flag
>>> /dev/hda2 20GB raid1
>>> /dev/hda3 20GB raid1
>>> /dev/hda4 2GB raid1
>>>
>>> /dev/hdc1 108GB raid1 bootable flag
>>> /dev/hdc2 20GB raid1
>>> /dev/hdc3 20GB raid1
>>> /dev/hdc4 2GB raid1
>>>
>>> /dev/md0 108GB / raid1
>>> /dev/md1 20GB /home raid1
>>> /dev/md2 20GB /tmp raid1
>>> /dev/md3 2GB swap raid1
>>>
>>> (that's roughly how it's setup)
>>>
>>> All seems to go well debian install goes right through and installs
>>> all the software, claims grub is installed and reboots.  At which
>>> point I get a no bootable device found.  I think maybe grub didn't
>>> get install correctly so I try booting into debian rescue.  Debian
>>> can't mount the raid, doesn't see it, just the raw raid partitions.
>>> Just for kicks I boot Fedora 6 rescue, it sees the partitions no
>>> problem and mounts them all for me to work with.  So from Fedora 6
>>> rescue I chroot and reinstall grub, reboot, and still no boot
>>> devices.  Then I find the following article:
>>>
>>> http://valery.bgit.net/blog-en/2006/07/30/debian-installer-sata-and-
>>> software-raid/
>>>
>>> And figure I'll give that a shot.  I step through the whole article
>>> (converting SATA to PATA instructions) and no problem, reboot and no
>>> bootable devices.  At this point I've started trying to play with the
>>> bios settings to see if that helps, I'm just wondering if there is a
>>> known issue with Debian Grub and booting from software raid devices
>>> (which should not be a challenge like this).  Any clues?
>>>
>>> And this is Debian Etch v 4.0 r1 i3.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> David
>>>
>>>
>>> David A. Cafaro <dac at cafaro.net>
>>> Cafaro's Ramblings:  www.cafaro.net
>>>
>>>
>>>
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