[Bug 960322] Re: Degraded Raid 6 boot fails with "invalid arch independent ELF magic"

[Ian Macintosh]

I had done that already.  But I redid it one more time anyway to be 100%
certain.  I then removed /dev/sda and it failed as given above.  No
change.

But then I decided to test by removing different drives, not just
/dev/sda.

If I remove /dev/sdb, the exact errors given are:

error: fd0 read error.
error: unknown LVM metadata header.
error: fd0 read error.
error: no such disk.

The "error: fd0 read error." messages are normally present and not
relevant.

At grub rescue>, "set" gives
prefix=(vg-boot)/grub
root=vg-boot

and "ls (vg-boot)/grub" as expected by the LVM error above, gives
error: no such disk.

If I remove /dev/sdc, in addition to the normal "fd0" messages, I only get
error: invalid arch independent ELF magic.

If I remove /dev/sdd, it boots perfectly fine, except for the degraded
raid boot notices (I have "bootdegraded=yes" on the kernel command
line).

So it appears that the behaviour is completely dependent on which drive
of the raid set has failed.

Slightly strange behaviour after reconnecting /dev/sdd, grub flashed up
the message "Invalid environment block" as it booted, but then it
started up fine.  I had to 'mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/sdd1' to get the
array back into full operation after startup of course.

I think I should retest the entire scenario, but remove LVM from the
equation.  Will post results in a bit.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/960322

Title:
  Degraded Raid 6 boot fails with "invalid arch independent ELF magic"

Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  To replicate: Create or build a server with sufficient drives for a
  Raid 6 array, remove one of the raid drives, and try to boot.

  In my case I created an ESXi 5.0 VM with Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10 64bit
  Server (ubuntu-11.10-server-amd64.iso) with 1 GB RAM, and 4 x 3GB
  drives.  Manual setup, partition the 4 drives, Raid 6 them, create an
  LVM vg with 0.5G /boot, 1G swap and the balance on /.

  It installs and reboots without an issue.  I shut it down, removed
  /dev/sda and tried to boot.

  Fails with "invalid arch independent ELF magic"

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
  Package: grub2 1.99-12ubuntu5
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.20-server 3.0.4
  Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-server x86_64
  ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu3
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Tue Mar 20 15:30:10 2012
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Server 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Release amd64 (20111011)
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
   LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: grub2
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

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