Re: Squeeze, GPT, GRUB2 and Software RAID1

[chris <tknchris@gmail.com>]

Hello,

I recently went through the same thing as you with squeeze and some 2T and 3T drives. The thing that has been working really well for me is to create a small partition with the special flag of bios boot partition. The installer has this option for a partition type but when I did it in the installer but it never worked for me. I booted knoppix and did it then the installer worked all automagically.

check out this url for more info

http://grub.enbug.org/BIOS_Boot_Partition

- chris

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 5:32 AM, Georgi Naplatanov <gosho@oles.biz> wrote:

On 03/27/2011 11:33 PM, Tom H wrote:

On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 10:35 AM, Georgi Naplatanov<gosho@oles.biz>  wrote:

I have 2 disk Western Digital WD2002FAEX - 2TB and I want to install Squeeze
with software RAID 1 and GPT instead of old MSDOS partition map.

I want to use GRUB2 as boot loader, but I read that is needed to be created
a BIOS Boot Partition.[1]

I have 2 disk and I want when one of them fail to be possible to boot from
another.

My question is - Will installer, GRUB2 and Squeeze handle synchronization of
BIOS Boot Partition on both disks or I have to do it manually and eventually
how to do it manually ?

I've found that you have to format your disks before the install (and
create a bios_grub partition) and you then have to run "grub-install
/dev/sdb" once you're booted into your install.

You can probably install grub on both disks by refusing to install to
the MBR and then installing it to (hd0) and (hd1) but I've never tried
it.

Hello Tom.

Yesterday I installed Squeeze (AMD64) (in expert mode) on my computer and refused the installer to install GRUB2 on MBR and tell it to install on "(hd0) (hd1)". The installation works very well, Linux boots successfully from both drives.

In both cases - GPT and MSDOS, grub2 installs in MBR, but in different ways. I found this explanation :

"Note that if you've converted an MBR disk to GPT format, booting will fail even if you were previously using a GPT-aware version of GRUB. This is because the MBR and GPT boot-time code for GRUB is different; in fact, GRUB installs part of itself just after the MBR on MBR-based disks (when you install it to the MBR), but that space becomes used by GPT on GPT disks, so converting MBR to GPT will wipe out part of GRUB. Re-installing a GPT-aware GRUB, as just described, will correct this problem." [1].

May be Debian installer has to explain more detail how to install GRUB2 with GPT or handle it automatically.

Thank you.

Regards
Georgi

[1] - http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/booting.html

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