maas grub issue

[Daniel Bidwell]

Attempting to boot from /dev/sde failed with no mbr/grub.

When it came up with the "rescue" image mounted via iscsi from the maas
server, I was able to mount /dev/sde1 on /mnt and examine it.  It had
done the installation on /dev/sde1.  I attempted created the /dev/sde*
devices on /mnt/dev and did a chroot to /mnt (running directly off the
/dev/sde1 partition) and tried to run grub-install /dev/sde.  It came
back and refused to install grub in the GPT space available.  I then
removed /dev/sde1 and created a new /dev/sde1 partition starting at
blocks 34-2047 and a new /dev/sde2 partition from blocks 2048 to the
end of the 120GB disk.  I set the flags for /dev/sde1 to bios_grub on
and rebooted, selecting /dev/sde as the boot disk.  This time it came
up just fine.

I see that I can create a sde-part1 with maas, is there a way to create
an sde-part2 also?  Should I be configuring the hardware and maas to be
using efi boot instead?  If so how do I do that?

On Thu, 2016-10-06 at 14:22 -0400, Andres Rodriguez wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> While I do not know yet what exactly the issue you are facing is, it
> sounds like a problem in hardware configuration. In some situations,
> you need to make sure your machine is correctly configured in MAAS in
> order to be usable. While MAAS does a pretty good job on
> automatically discovering information  and making some initial
> config, there may be corner cases where the hardware itself (BIOS
> config) prevent MAAS from working without doing some configuration.
> 
> In this case, it sounds like the BIOS may be configured to boot of
> from a different disk than the one MAAS is installing the MBR/GTP on.
> If that's the case, you could do one of two things: 
> You can either configure the machine in MAAS, and change the 'Boot'
> flag to the disk that's the actual boot disk in the BIOS.
> Or you can configure your BIOS correctly to make sure the disk that
> maps to /dev/sde is the boot disk.
> I'll ask for some more information on the bug report and we can
> follow the conversation there if so you wish.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/maas/+bug/1631083
> 
> On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 11:18 AM, Daniel Bidwell <drbidwell at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I have a maas-1.9.4 with servers with 4 2T disks for data storage
> > and a
> > 120GB disk on an onboard controller for the system disk.  Maas is
> > deploying ubuntu 16.04 on the servers.  Ubuntu 16.04 labels the
> > 120GB
> > system disk as /dev/sde, not /dev/sda.  In maas I can define the
> > /sdev/sde disk as the system disk.
> > 
> > juju bootstrap deploys the system and installs the OS on /dev/sde1
> > but
> > fails to write the grub record to /dev/sde and leaves the disk
> > unbootable.  The system fails over to booting from an ephemeral
> > iscsi
> > file system where I can examine the state of the machine.
> > 
> > The disk is formated with a GPT partition table which grub will not
> > write to unless I manually create a small partition as partition 1
> > with
> > blocks from 34-2047 and the system partition as partition 2.
> > 
> > This manual step really not acceptable for deploying from juju and
> > maas.
> > 
> > How do I get maas to deploy the system in a way that it will boot
> > without manual editing?
> > --
> > Daniel Bidwell <drbidwell at gmail.com>
> > 
> > 
> > --
> > Maas-devel mailing list
> > Maas-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
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> > 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Andres Rodriguez
> Engineering Manager, MAAS
> Canonical USA, Inc.
-- 
Daniel Bidwell <drbidwell at gmail.com>