Sounder 8 installation notes

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 01:26:03AM +1000, James Gregory wrote:

> I chose XFS as the partition type and it worked ok, but I got a rather
> unfriendly warning about how XFS was likely to not work and that I
> probably needed a boot partition. The partition in question was the first
> one on the disk and it was a 32GB partition. I was pretty sure it would
> boot ok, so I let it use the unrecommended partition type (why isn't XFS
> recommended? It's great).

You have independently discovered one of the reasons why XFS is not my first
choice.

> After it rebooted, my machine went back to the Fedora boot process that
> was previously setup. I addded a lilo entry there to boot from /dev/hdg1.
> Curiously, when I chose that option it booted me into windows XP (the
> other, other operating system on this box). I thought that perhaps the
> drive letters had been swapped for some reason but booting into the
> 'windows' option from outer-lilo also booted me to winxp. I then booted
> Fedora again and tried to mount /dev/hdg1. No go.  Lessing both /dev/hde1
> and /dev/hdg1 shows an NT boot loader on hde1 and GRUB on hdg1. I have the
> sinking suspicion at this point that installing GRUB has destroyed the XFS
> partition.

Most Linux filesystems leave the space at the very start of the device
empty, because it is traditionally used for things like boot loaders.  XFS,
on the other hand, places its superblock, containing precious filesystem
metadata, in the very first block.

Some tools, such as lilo, attempt to implement a safeguard for this by
testing whether the device appears to contain an XFS filesystem, and if so,
refusing to proceed.  The grub installer does not seem to do this at the
present time.  This check is simple to implement, but it hasn't been done
(yet).

Because it is so important, both XFS and ext3 maintain backup copies of the
superblock data.  If your XFS filesystem has not been further damaged, it
may be recoverable.  I would look first to xfs_repair, but I personally do
not use XFS at all, so take my advice with a grain of saft.

> I now need to figure where I can install a boot-loader and try again.
> Will write again once I get that done. If anyone has some good ideas about
> a way to setup Ubuntu alongside two other OSes, mail me off-list.

My recommendation would be to install grub in the master boot record.

-- 
 - mdz