Bug#307869: RAID1 partition not marked bootable by installer

[Anton Zinoviev <anton@lml.bas.bg>]

On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 07:09:26PM -0500, Don Faulkner wrote:
> 
> The filesystems were initialized and the preliminary data was loaded.  
> Grub was installed. Following this procedure, the CD-ROM ejected and I  
> was instructed to reboot. Upon reboot, the BIOS reported that it was  
> unable to boot from disk.

Are you sure that was BIOS?  Because for BIOS it is irrelevant whether
you boot from RAID or from usual partition.

> I rebooted with the CD and ran fdisk manually on  
> /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc and  
> /dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target1/lun0/disc. Using fdisk, I marked partition  
> 1 on both disks startable (fdisk's 'a' command), and wrote the tables.  
> When I rebooted, the system booted normally.

And for grub it is irrelevant whether the bootable flag is set or not.

Probably the following has happened?

1. You installed grub in a partition rather than in MBR.  The disk
contains the old MBR (probably a DOS or Win one).

2. BIOS loads the old MBR.

3. The old MBR looks for a partition with a bootable flag set but can't
find and emits a message that looks like a BIOS message.

4. You set the bootable flag of the partition that contains grub.

5. Upon restart the old MBR runs the boot sector ot the bootable
partition.  This sector contains grub and the system starts.

Anton Zinoviev