Sounder 8 installation notes

[James Gregory]

On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 01:26 +1000, James Gregory wrote:
> [ lots of stuff ]

More on the saga that is: Getting My Machine to Boot.

I have now tried the installation with xfs, reiserfs and ext3. In all
such cases I have been asking that the machine install the boot loader
to hd0, since it seemed the most likely thing. In every case, rebooting
has started grub and grub is telling me 'Error 21'. This led to an
interesting problem -- how do I get back the old boot loader so I can
fix it. I asked on #ubuntu and was told that I can use the 2nd console
as a rescue console. I tried this but my raid partitions weren't there.
I wasn't sure what magic is done at boot time to bring up my raid
partitions so I mounted one of the members of the / raid partition and
looked in rc.sysinit. It turns out that you need some stuff in /sbin to
start raid up. That stuff wasn't on the ubuntu CD. I tried copying that
stuff back to /sbin in the ramdisk and stuff, largely without success.

Anyway, I eventually remembered that since the old bootloader was LILO,
it would be on both disks. I set it to boot from the other disk and that
let me get lilo back. I suspect that I'll need to rebuild the raid
array, but that's no big deal. Fedora no longer boots, so I now need to
get ubuntu working so that there's something there to do that
rebuilding.

I am about to try an install and tell it to put the boot loader in the
partition I install to with a non-XFS filesystem. I'll let you all know
how it goes.

This email was mostly to highlight the fact that there appears to be no
clear recovery path for RAID systems; that's probably not an issue for a
desktop OS but I would hate for it to have been omitted by oversight
rather than by design. It is also curious that grub refuses to work on
this box. If there's something I can run that would help diagnose that
problem then I'll give it a go.

James.

-- 
James Gregory <james at james.id.au>
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