On 13/06/12 19:56, Tom H wrote:
On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Gary Dale <garydale@rogers.com> wrote:For example, Squeeze has problems with booting from partitioned RAID arrays. After running update-initramfs and update-grub, I find that the UUID for the partitions has been replaced with the UUID for the array, so that the boot fails. This particular problem can be solved by fixing the UUIDs in grub.cfg.grub2 was patched about a year ago to boot from a partitioned mdraid "/boot" but I don't know whether that change made it into squeeze.
I have just found the GNU grub development mailing list discussion, here: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2012-02/msg00003.htmlAlthough the symptoms are the same as the Debian bug (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=610184), I'm not sure whether the causes are.
I believe, in my case, the cause is the one discussed in the GNU list, namely that grub couldn't accurately detect whether a partition of the whole disk was assigned for RAID use. In the developer's own words,
"if you have < 64KiB between end of disk and end of partition the metadata is exactly in the same place for either if the whole disks are raided or only partitions. And no field which allows to distinguish those"...
On that basis, and the fact that grub in squeeze 6.0.5 seemed to exhibit the problem, I decided to update the machine to testing/wheezy instead and see if the problem disappears.
I can confirm that it has. The error message no longer appears at boot time and I don't need to intervene to get to my login prompt.
For anyone reading this in the same dilemma, I'm not sure if things like this would get backported to squeeze or not - perhaps someone has an idea how to find out...
Thanks, Steve -- Steve Dowe Warp Universal Limited http://warp2.me/sd