[Bug 1361842] Re: dmraid does not start on boot for single disk RAID0

[Jason Gunthorpe]

The LSI option rom will not present a drive to the EFI BIOS without a raid
label on the disc. If the array is deleted then EFI will not boot off the
drive at all. As far as I can tell there is no fall back option rom that
provides simple AHCI services to EFI.

This is the problem, because the boot script is wrong the installer and so
forth has a very high probability to destroy the RAID label when it writes
a GPT partition label, which renders the system unbootable, and unless you
actually know about this quirk the only symptom is that the boot menu from
the BIOS has no option to boot from the hard drive.

On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 9:18 AM, Phillip Susi <psusi at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> You can just delete the raid array in the bios utility, or use dmraid -E
> to erase it.
>
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> Title:
>   dmraid does not start on boot for single disk RAID0
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1361842

Title:
  dmraid does not start on boot for single disk RAID0

Status in “dmraid” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  I have a Lenovo server with a LSI controller that insists on having a
  RAID set to boot. So the BIOS is configured with a RAID0 stripe set,
  with a single disk:

  $ dmraid -i -si
  *** Group superset .ddf1_disks
  --> Subset
  name   : ddf1_4c5349202020202080861d60000000004711471100001450
  size   : 974608384
  stride : 128
  type   : stripe
  status : ok
  subsets: 0
  devs   : 1
  spares : 0

  Notice that 'devs' is 1.

  This causes this bit of code in dm-activate to bail:

          case "$Raid_Type" in
                  stripe)
                          if [ "$Raid_Nodevs" -lt 2 ]; then
                                  if [ -n "$Degraded" ]; then
                                          log_error "Cannot bring up a RAID0 array in degraded mode, not all devices present."
                                  fi
                                  return 2
                          fi
                          ;;

  Of course, the above is totally bogus, a 1 disk RAID0 is perfectly
  valid. I wonder if this should be testing 'status' instead?

  This is a problem because of GPT partitioning. If you don't start the
  RAID downstream tools will attempt to partition sda. The RAID metadata
  at the end of the disk collides with the GPT partition backup and it
  ends up destroying the RAID set and making the server unbootable. The
  kernel hints at this condition:

  [    4.202136] GPT:Primary header thinks Alt. header is not at the end of the disk.
  [    4.202137] GPT:974608383 != 976773167
  [    4.202138] GPT:Alternate GPT header not at the end of the disk.
  [    4.202138] GPT:974608383 != 976773167

  Which is 100% true, the GPT was written to the RAID, not the raw disk,
  and 974608383 sectors is at the end of the raid volume.

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