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?
Jack
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
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*
Jack
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
On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 11:31 -0500, Jack Neely wrote:
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?
More likely it's #202101 , which makes me cry.
(and has enough private comments that it's probably entirely unreadable :/ )
On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 06:14:11PM -0500, Peter Jones wrote:
On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 11:31 -0500, Jack Neely wrote:
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?
More likely it's #202101 , which makes me cry.
(and has enough private comments that it's probably entirely unreadable :/ )
-- Peter
Yup, I'm "not authorized."
Jack
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.
FWIW, I do exactly that on my FC4 system w/o any problems at all. Note, I'm *not* claiming FC4 Anaconda supported anything like that, I did it all--created the RAID1 volumes and installed grub--manually after the fact.
$ rpm -q grub grub-0.95-13 $ uname -r 2.6.14-1.1653_FC4smp $ mount ... /dev/md0 on /boot type ext3 (rw) $ cat /boot/grub/grub.conf ... title Fedora Core (2.6.14-1.1653_FC4) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.14-1.1653_FC4 ro root=/dev/md1 rhgb quiet initrd /initrd-2.6.14-1.1653_FC4.img $
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