scary RAID-1 problems

[Christopher K. Johnson]

Jack Howarth wrote:

>  Well things seem stable now. I can do a complete
>shutdown to a powered off state and restart with
>the bootloader being found in the MBR now as well
>as a warm reboot. At this point I am wondering if
>the stage2 error I initially saw might have been
>related to the machine attempting to boot off of
>the second SATA drive at /dev/sdb in the RAID-1
>array (due to the first not coming up for some
>reason). If that is the case it would suggest
>the Tux Tip for making the second drive bootable
>may not really work.
>  Also I am still very concerned about this 
>issue of grub-install not being able to write
>the MBR for RAID-1 drives after the initial
>installation. This really needs to be addressed
>for FC3. Otherwise what options to I have if
>my MBR gets managled other than resorting to a
>clean install of FC2? Blah.
>                       Jack
>ps On the positive side I did see the resync of
>the two drives after I finally got the RAID-1
>to boot again so I know the RAID-1 really works
>(grin).
>
>
>  
>
The procedure has been tested to work fine on scsi and ide drives with 
earlier RH9 and FC1 installations.
And it has been tested with ide drives so far on FC2.
By tested I mean follow the procedure, shutdown, remove one disk, boot 
at least to the grub menu, shutdown, swap which disk is removed, boot at 
least to the grub menu again.  If you power down at the grub menu the 
status of raid partitions is unaltered so everything remains in sync 
when you subsequently boot with both drives installed.

So either the procedure was not adapted to your configuration correctly, 
or this is a new SATA related issue, or something more complex was 
happening with your hardware.

I can verify your procedure if you provide a copy of your grub.conf and 
what commands you used.
Any SATA or hardware related issues will require someone else's help.  I 
don't have that on any machines here yet.
You could however follow the same testing process I described above to 
establish whether the MBR on both drives is correctly initialized for 
grub to locate stage2 files in /boot.

Chris

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   "Spend less!  Do more!  Go Open Source..." -- Dirigo.net
   Chris Johnson, RHCE #807000448202021