[Bug 899841] [NEW] Blank screen on booting Ubuntu 11.10 from RAID

[Youssef Eldakar]

Public bug reported:

I run a network of machines each having 4 hard drives. Most are
installed as JBOD (just a bunch of disks), but some are installed as
RAID, where / is on a RAID1 device. After upgrading to 11.10, the RAID
machines display a blank screen right at the beginning of the boot
process and stop there - most of the time. The system does respond to
Ctrl+Alt+Del at that state, and, every once in a while after many
successive reboots, the system does boot successfully. I tested this on
two different hardware configurations (nVidia chipset and Intel chipset)
and with both 64- and 32-bit Ubuntu with no difference in results. The
JBOD machines do not suffer from this issue.

Turning off modesetting does not seem to help. Given that the non-RAID
(jBOD) setup works fine, I am thinking the issue is probably a GRUB+RAID
issue, not a graphics issue. I noticed in 11.10 that /boot/grub/grub.cfg
uses mduuid/* as opposed to md/*. Could that have something to do with
the problem? I wonder if there is a preseed configuration to instruct
grub-installer to use md/* instead of mduuid/*.

** Affects: grub-installer (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/899841

Title:
  Blank screen on booting Ubuntu 11.10 from RAID

Status in “grub-installer” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  I run a network of machines each having 4 hard drives. Most are
  installed as JBOD (just a bunch of disks), but some are installed as
  RAID, where / is on a RAID1 device. After upgrading to 11.10, the RAID
  machines display a blank screen right at the beginning of the boot
  process and stop there - most of the time. The system does respond to
  Ctrl+Alt+Del at that state, and, every once in a while after many
  successive reboots, the system does boot successfully. I tested this
  on two different hardware configurations (nVidia chipset and Intel
  chipset) and with both 64- and 32-bit Ubuntu with no difference in
  results. The JBOD machines do not suffer from this issue.

  Turning off modesetting does not seem to help. Given that the non-RAID
  (jBOD) setup works fine, I am thinking the issue is probably a
  GRUB+RAID issue, not a graphics issue. I noticed in 11.10 that
  /boot/grub/grub.cfg uses mduuid/* as opposed to md/*. Could that have
  something to do with the problem? I wonder if there is a preseed
  configuration to instruct grub-installer to use md/* instead of
  mduuid/*.

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