grub problem

[Rashkae]

Luca Ferrari wrote:
> On Monday 25 May 2009 10:36:38 pm Rashkae wrote:
>> mdadm --assemble --scan --auto-update-homehost
> 
> A little step further: doing the above in the busybox shell and then exiting 
> the shell allows me to boot the system, that is the system starts doing the 
> normal boot. If I then reboot, again I'm dropped in the busybox shell, and if 
> I exit without doing the above command the system cannot continue booting. If 
> I boot the system doing the above steps, and then perfoming again an mdadm 
> update and a grub install I'm not able to boot the system normally.
> It seems as I'm always dropped to the busybox shell, always with the warning 
> about the md0 device. So it seems the problem is not in grub (or its 
> configuration), rather in the md0 configuration.
> 

Sorry, I don't really understand what your current problem is, nor how
you got there.  However, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that
your fixation with Grub and grub install is not helping matters at all.
Grub is only responsible for finding the Kernel (and optionally, the
initrd file) and loading those into memory. That you got as far as busy
box is proof positive that grub is working just fine and has already
completed it's task.

It's possible you might have to edit your menu.lst file, in particular
if you need to change the root= setting of the kernel options, but in no
way should you have to change partitions or run grub install at this point.


I'm a bit of a loss as to why your system isn't building the raid array
on it's own, and yet you can manually build it.  Is there any useful
output if you try simply "mdadm --assemble --scan" ? ( in theory, that's
what the system should be doing on it's own.)  You might also run
"dmesg" to see if there's any clue in the output.  Is there something
strange about the controllers your hard drives are on that might mean
the drives have some kind of delay being recognized by the Kernel?  How
was this raid array created in the first place.  Was the system
installed on the Raid array, was the raid array created during
installation, or did you create the array after installation and move
your data to it.  Are you using LVM?  (Unfortunately, I know too little
of LVM to be any assistance there.)