Re: LILO with root-raid nightmare - please help.

[drbob <drbob@gmx.co.uk>]

drbob wrote:

> I'll post here if the changes I suggest above have any effect.
>
> regards,
>
> drbob


Before I did this I tried a few different settings in lilo.conf and had 
some success :-).

Setting raid-extra-boot=mbr-only avoided the error I  was seeing previously:

:/etc# lilo -v
LILO version 22.6.1, Copyright (C) 1992-1998 Werner Almesberger
Development beyond version 21 Copyright (C) 1999-2004 John Coffman
Released 17-Nov-2004, and compiled at 12:32:32 on May 25 2005
Debian GNU/Linux

Warning: Kernel & BIOS return differing head/sector geometries for 
device 0x80
   Kernel: 13872 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors
     BIOS: 1023 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors
Using BIOS device code 0x80 for RAID boot blocks
Reading boot sector from /dev/md1
Using MENU secondary loader
Calling map_insert_data

Boot image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.24.raidserver1
Added RAID *

Reading boot sector from /dev/hda
Warning: /dev/hda is not on the first disk
/boot/boot.0300 exists - no boot sector backup copy made.
The Master boot record of  /dev/hda  has been updated.
Reading boot sector from /dev/hde
/boot/boot.2100 exists - no boot sector backup copy made.
The Master boot record of  /dev/hde  has been updated.

I believe the problem may have stemmed from the fact that I originally 
set up the array on woody with a version of lilo that needed to 
overwrite the mbr of each of the physical disks, apparently this isn't 
the default behavior for raid in newer versions of lilo. I can now boot 
from the new disk. I'm still not sure why lilo thought installing an mbr 
onto /md1 would wipe the file system, (the mbr-only option prevents it 
from attempting this) could it be due to /md1 being quite small, it's 
only 15Mb?

Hope this helps anyone who has a similar problem.

regards,

drbob