Comments on: Debian 5.0 (Lenny) install on Software RAID

By: gimili

gimili — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 02:41:37 +0000

Got it thanks (see below). Also I see Debian 6 is out now. I wonder if the raid 1 will work better.

grub
Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.

GNU GRUB version 0.97 (640K lower / 3072K upper memory)[ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible completions of a device/filename. ]

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
find /boot/grub/stage1
(hd0,0)
(hd1,0)
grub> device (hd0) /dev/sdb
device (hd0) /dev/sdb
grub> root (hd0,0)
root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0xfd
grub> setup (hd0)
setup (hd0)
Checking if “/boot/grub/stage1” exists… yes
Checking if “/boot/grub/stage2” exists… yes
Checking if “/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5” exists… yes
Running “embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)”… 17 sectors are embedded.
succeeded
Running “install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+17 p (hd0,0)/boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/menu.lst”… succeeded
Done.
grub> quit
quit

By: smulcahy

smulcahy — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 15:51:15 +0000

Before unplugging any drives, make sure you install grub on both drives – google for installing grub on multiple drives or similar – then the system will boot for either drives.

By: gimili

gimili — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 16:34:24 +0000

Thanks for the tips. So I unplugged sdb from the motherboard and rebooted no problem. I got my warning email. 🙂 🙂 Then I plugged sdb back in and the drives re-synced. Then I turned off the system and unplugged sda and the system would **not** boot which I kind of suspected. Any tips on how to make sdb bootable in case sda fails? I have googled this problem but I have still not figured it out. Thanks again.

By: smulcahy

smulcahy — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:16:00 +0000

Hi,

Glad to hear the article was useful. I’ve certainly unplugged drives from Linux Software RAID1 configurations and the system boots ok – but yes, you should try it – better to identify any problems now than when the drive really does fail. That debian bug you reference is already fixed so you should get that notification. In addition to that, mdadm will mail you an alert any time a problem occurs anyway – just make sure /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf contains the correct value for the MAILADDR parameter.

By: gimili

gimili — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 01:49:07 +0000

I couldn’t get raid setup using debian-508-amd64-netinst.iso until I used your instructions. A BIG thanks! On another note I was hoping to unplug a drive and see if the system would still boot. I also wanted to see if it would email me an error. I added this to cron */10 * * * * /sbin/mdadm –monitor –scan -1. Have you tried this sort of testing? I see there is a cron.daily to be added for future versions: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=497949.

By: smulcahy

smulcahy — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 10:22:18 +0000

I’m not sure why you would want to try that – it might work although not sure how update-grub would behave during the reinstall with debian-507-amd64-netinst.iso – I think the workaround mentioned in my article might be safer.

By: gimili

gimili — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 01:21:17 +0000

Would it somehow be possible to use debian-505-i386-CD-1.iso and then after grub and raid is going reinstall with debian-507-amd64-netinst.iso?

By: Sketch

Sketch — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 09:07:18 +0000

Helpful, thanks.

debian-507-amd64-netinst.iso still has this problem. Your page ended hours of head scratching.

By: smulcahy

smulcahy — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:32:17 +0000

Hi Danila,

Thanks – thats good to know. The Ubuntu 10.04 grub installer also seems to take care of this automatically.

-stephen

By: Danila Prepeleac

Danila Prepeleac — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:24:01 +0000

Hello,

with debian-505-i386-CD-1.iso it works even in normal instalation mode, you don’t need this workaround.