Re: issue with mdadm and mirroring drives
18/01/2012 19:38, Joey L wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 12:49 PM, tv.debian@googlemail.com
> <tv.debian@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> > 18/01/2012 18:03, Joey L wrote:
>>> >> The issue I am having is that if I put into the system both drives,
>>> >> the system always chooses the faulty drive.
>>> >> I do not even get linux system - i get a weird text prompt - i think
>>> >> it is initrdfs - even if i change it in the bios.
>>> >>
>>> >> On installing grub - can you tell me what is the procedure for that
>>> >> after i get my drives to an okay state ?
>>> >>
>>> >> thanks
>>> >> mjh
initrd is a later stage than grub menu, grub comes second after bios,
and is in charge of loading the initrd. So if you get to the initrd
"busybox" shell it means you got past the grub menu. Otherwise what you
think is initrd really is either bios or grub.
Maybe it's time you give us some details about your setup, what kind of
computer is this, and what flavor of Debian are you running on it (grub
version would be nice too) ?
How exactly is the boot sequence occurring, what do you "see" and in
what order ?
How do you know it "chooses" the faulty drive ?
No matter which drive the system boots on, it will fail to bring up the
raid array your root partition resides on if it's flagged as degraded,
unless you pass the necessary option I gave you earlier. It is possible
to assemble the array from the busybox ("initrd") shell and resume the
init ("boot") process, but if we don't have more details, or if you
don't tell us exactly what you try and the result (error messages), we
can keep shooting in the dark for a long time.
If you can't get it to boot by itself it may be easier to boot from a
recovery live-cd, any will do as long as it has mdadm installed or
installable. From there it will be possible to start the degraded raid
array, make sure it works, "chroot" on it (means "transferring" the
live-cd shell to the target system), and then issue commands as if they
were issued from the target system. Or for a start you could simply
assemble the array, start it and mount the target system's partition,
and edit the grub menu entry to add the necessary option.
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