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

[Alex Meier]

Hi @ll,

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).


Thanx a lot in advance,
Andi