Installation issue: after installing Ubuntu 9.10, it hangs on boot

[Tom H]

>> I hope this is the correct platform to discuss my problem, otherwise
>> please point me in the right direction.
>>
>> I installed Ubuntu 9.10 (being new to Ubuntu, but not to Linux in
>> general). After finishing the installation (from an USB pen drive), the
>>
>> installer told me to reboot. But the system hangs on boot with merely a
>> blinking cursor on the screen, no loader messages (I chose grub2 as
>> boot loader), nothing.

>> Since the mainboard does not feature IDE ports and my SATA hdds seem not
>> to be willing to boot, I am only able to use USB pendrive for

>> diagnostic purposes, for instance the Super Grub Disk. However, I did not
>> succeed to find any useful information to my problem.

>> Could somebody give me a hint what I can do to either solve the problem or
>> at least diagnose it in more depth?

>> Some facts:
>> During Ubunut installation, I configured a software RAID:
>> My 3 HDDs are partitioned having a 4 GB and a 1,5 TB partition each.
>> Two of the 3 4 GB partitions are used a RAID1 system disk (root
>> filesystem), the 3rd as a Swap Area.

>> The remaining three 1,5 TB partitions will then be used as RAID5 but this
>> is a second issue.

>> Once again:
>>   hda1 ... 4 GB added to RAID device #0 (RAID1)
>>   hda2 ... 1,6 TB added to RAID device #1 (RAID5)

>>   hdb1 ... 4 GB added to RAID device #0 (RAID1)
>>   hdb2 ... 1,6 TB added to RAID device #1 (RAID5)
>>   hdc1 ... 4 GB added to RAID device #0 (RAID1)
>>   hdc2 ... 1,6 TB added to RAID device #1 (RAID5)
>>   RAID device #0 ... ext4, mounted at /
>>   RAID device #1 ... ext4, mounted at /data

>> The BIOS boot sequence is: only from HDD (I disabled booting from
>> removable media or CD-ROM).


> I had the same problem even with 9.04 and in my case i found a tricky
> solution. I have a motherboard with a fakeRAID soution based on an
> intel ICH10 but i prefer to use the software RAID that come to linux. The
> problem is that the dm_raid45 module necesary to use fakeRAID that i
> "don't" activate during installation is really activate and in some manner
> blocks the linux software raid. The solution in my case was easy when
> i got to find the problem :)
> - Boot from other media (i used the ubuntu alternative install cd)
> - Mount the root, the boot and proc partitions
> - chroot to the installed ubuntu
> - apt-get remove dmraid
> In the process it re-make the initrd boot image without the tools and
> modules of the dmraid and after rebooting it boots perfectly.

Blacklisting dm_raid45 should be enough for initrd not to load it at boot.