RE: Booting degraded software raid1 with failed /dev/sda

[Tad Bak <T.Bak@uws.edu.au>]

Rob,

I have tried that (super grub boot disk) first, but I couldn't fix my problem. It’s very likely that I was doing something wrong, as I have started more serious RTFM only after that first failed attempt :-). Then the Debian live CD route worked for me.

Thanks,
  Tad
________________________________________
From: Rob Owens [rowens@ptd.net]
Sent: Tuesday, 6 August 2013 00:42
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Cc: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Booting degraded software raid1 with failed /dev/sda

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Tad Bak" <T.Bak@uws.edu.au>
>
> Background.
> I have Debian Wheezy 64bit installed on a machine with 2 SATA drives.
> On the hard drives I have two software RAID1 partitions, md0 and
> md1. The bigger md1 uses LVM and has separate volumes for swap,
> /tmp, /var, /opt, /usr, and /home. Everything was working fine,
> until one day the sda disc crashed and the system was not bootable
> anymore. This is how I have learned that by default Debian installs
> grub only on /dev/sda in RAID1 configuration. Despite the fact that
> /dev/sdb was still fine, I had no working system, as I couldn't boot
> it. After two days of Google search I have found a solution, which
> might be of interest to somebody in similar situation.
>
Would super grub boot disk have worked for you?  I have used it plenty of times to boot a system w/ a messed up grub, but I don't know if I've ever tried it on a system that used software RAID 1.

-Rob