Re: Dual-booting with GRUB, md, and hardware RAID
On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 05:23:57PM -0700, Michael Armida wrote:
> I am having a problem with the Debian installer whereby I can't get my
> machine to find the GRUB loader. This is probably a problem with my
> motherboard (asus m2n sli deluxe), and not so much the installer per se,
> but please let me know if you see away around this.
I have the same board. No windows.
>
> I've got four drives in my machine, sdc and sdd are a "hardware" RAID
> via the nvidia controller running vista 64. sda and sdb are laid out
> for a software raid via md like this:
>
That 'hardware' raid is not, so as far as linux goes, its separate
disks.
> sda1, sdb1: ext3 at /boot
> sda2, sdb2: lvm on raid for everything else (swap included)
>
> At the end of the install process, GRUB gets installed into the MBR and
> the installer correctly ids Vista's presence, but on reboot, I end up
> right back in Vista. I checked out my BIOS and RAID options, and here's
> a summary of the limitations:
>
> - BIOS only allows for me to pick between things like "Hard drives,"
> "CDROM," "Floppy," and order they're tried in.
>
Thats the boot device priority (page 4-37 in your manual). Under hard
disk drives, you can also change the order of hard drives (p 438).
Unfortunatly I can't run the bios and send this email :)
At boot up, you can also hit F8 to get a boot menu of the drives it
finds (useful to boot from a USB stick that wasn't attached when you did
the bios setup).
Also, are you _sure_ that grub got installed? When I installed Etch
pre-RC1, it said it did but didn't. I had to boot the installer in
rescue mode and choose 'install grub'.
Good luck.
Doug.
> - RAID setup only allows me to pick which of the currently active arrays
> to boot from. Since I'm using md, I didn't create an array for sda/sdb,
> and therefore only the windows array is available and is always marked
> for boot.
>
> - when in windows and the hardware raid is active, it only sees arrayed
> disks. sda and sdb don't even exist to device manager once booted; only
> the second array exists.
>
> I've tried the following:
>
> 1) originally my windows drives were sda and sdb, I've swapped them in
> the hope of being able to boot GRUB when they were first, but it appears
> that the RAID controller's boot priority takes precedence.
>
> 2) I've tried making a second array out of sda and sdb after the debian
> installer finished and then marking it for boot, but I just get a BIOS
> message about not finding the boot loader.
>
> 3) if all of the arrays are deleted, it just hangs on a black screen.
> I'm guessing this is trying sda and not getting anywhere.
>
> 4) I've booted into a Knoppix cd and then run 'grub-install
> --root-directory=/mnt/sda1 /dev/sda' in the hopes that would hit the MDR
> of the first drive, but this doesn't change #3.
>
> 5) I've tried using EasyBCD in windows to get the vista boot loader to
> chain to GRUB, but it doesn't seem to find it. I'm guessing this has to
> do with the "windows only sees arrays" observation above.
>
> Sounds to me like I would optimally like to be able to make the boot
> process aware of the nvidia raid and then use GRUB to install to that
> (isn't this a bad idea generally? Guides I've read say to avoid the
> vendor-specific raid drivers and just stick with pure md). Alternately,
> maybe there's a way to get Knoppix to install to the md device instead
> of sda or sdb, and somehow get the BIOS to play nice and boot there -
> wherein the problem is getting the motherboard to let me choose which
> specific device to boot from.
>
> Any other suggestions for how to solve this would be greatly
> appreciated. I'm pretty new to Linux and RAID stuff, so I apologize in
> advance for my naivete and need for specifics.
>
> Thanks,
> Michael
>
>
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