RAID + Dual Boot problems
 

I have hardware raid 0 set up on my windows boot drive. I installed Suse 9.3 on
my secondary harddrive and grub was installed as my boot manager. However,
during every boot, I get a Error 25 (apparently a disk read error... and it's apparently 'dreaded'... fun) from Grub. My system does not continue to boot. The only way I can enter an
operating system is by running a 'boot existing linux' type installation
from the Suse install dvd.

I attempted to restore to the windows boot loader using the recovery
console (fixmbr). I had no success. Inside linux, I tried to change my
boot manager to lilo, also to no avail. In linux, I have no access to my
raid hard drives. How can I set up grub to work?

I'm using a VIA 8237 raid chip.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. First priority is restoring access to windows, getting the dual boot working is secondary.

Thanks!

In order to fixmbr in Windows, you need to log into the installation. This being the case the mbr should be restored as Windows is very possessive of it. I would say your issue now lies with Windows or your RAID setup. Are you sure the RAID setup is correct, and it is attempting to boot the correct hard drive?

When it boots up do you get the words lilo or grub coming up? If you do, then your mbr has not been fixed. Also, and I am a little rusty..... did you try fixboot at the same time?

Hope this can help

I have tried both fixboot and fixmbr... not at the same time, though... I'll try that. I have been able to log into the correct windows installation by using a driver disk with my RAID drivers on them (in windows setup, you hit F6 to do this). However, I still get the grub screen every time I boot.

At this point...... sorry to say grub is still loaded in you mbr.

Can i suggest you grab a live cd. From the cd you can check all your settings and edit anything you need to. It may help you to simply repair grub, and correct any entries you have in the /boot/grub/menu.1st file. It sounds like grub didn't install properly.

You can disable the linux hard drive in your bios and then try to recover mbr so there can be no confusion to where Windows needs to the mbr. Also, if you have two hard drives, why not install grub to the linux hd's mbr and boot up to the linux disk first.

If you choose to have the linux disk mounted first (ie Primary Master) in /boot/grub/menu.1st file simply map the windows disk like this.

My setup is

Primary Master - HD1 - Slackware
PS - HD2 - Spare testing HD
SM - DVD-RW
SS - HD4 - WinXP for games and huge music partition

I have thrown in a few old ones that i keep for moments like this :-)

in grub, how would I refer to my hard drive that is a SATA raid 0? Is it still hd0, or is there a different name for it (is grub even able to access/recognize it?). I suspect that my raid setup is at the root of the problem.

(I have 3 hard drives -- 2 SATA hooked through a raid with windows on the first partition, and 1 PATA with windows on the first partition and linux on the fourth).

edit: There doesn't seem to be anything that looks particularly out of place with my menu.1st, except that grub refers to what should be one of my windows installations (on the raid drives) as 'linux, other' at hd0,0

With a true raid controller the (hd0,0) would become (sd0,0). I have a promise fasttrak tx2 controller which is a fake controller. This was seen as (hd0,0) because it was software driven only. Also in the file /etc/fstab your entries would be sdxx - where xx is harddrive and then partition.

For example

First HD with 3 partitions

sda1
sda2
sda3

Second HD

sdb1
sdb2
sdb3

I am not super with these setups as I only have the fake SATA

Now Grub is a fine piece of programming. Basically what it does is directs the computer to load what it needs to begin the OS environment. Similar to the Xp system where Xp's 'bootloader' had to create an environment for Win98 to load.

So grub has two stages. 1st is direction, second stage is environment eg if your partition are formatted as reiserfs, Grub has the drivers in the second stage to understand the formatting to then load the kernel. This is not entirely accurate, and I am sure others have a more technical understanding of this, but it is a start.

this is how my raid setup appears in fstab

/dev/sda1 /data1 auto noauto,user 0 0

it doesn't recognize it as ntfs; there's definitely some sort of config problem.

I will try using sd0,0.

edit: same error 25. In case it's helpful the following is my menu.1st file

# Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Sat Jul 23 08:12:29 UTC 2005

color white/blue black/light-gray
default 0
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd2,5)/boot/message

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title SUSE LINUX 9.3
kernel (hd2,5)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc6 vga=0x317 selinux=0 splash=silent console=tty0 resume=/dev/hdc5 showopts
initrd (hd2,5)/boot/initrd

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows###
title Windows
root (hd2,0)
chainloader +1

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: Linux other###
title Linux other
root (sd0,0)
chainloader +1

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: floppy###
title Floppy
root (fd0)
chainloader +1

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
title Failsafe -- SUSE LINUX 9.3
kernel (hd2,5)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc6 showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off vga=normal noresume selinux=0 barrier=off iommu=noforce 3
initrd (hd2,5)/boot/initrd

Ok, now we are cooking with gas my friend.

In your menu.1st file notice how grub is directing the initial boot up to (hdx,x) For all your Sata drives, this needs to be changes to
(sdx,x) and also where root=/dev/hdxx. to root=/dev/sdxx ONLY for the scsi drives. Normal drives are noted as hd

Example
This is only on example.

You will need to adjust your settings according to this method.

(sd0,0) means (sd first scsi hard drive, first partition)
(sd0,1) means (sd first scsi hard drive, second partition)
(sd1,0) means (sd Second scsi hard drive, first partition)
(sd2,1) means (sd Second scsi hard drive, second partition)

Then when it comes to root= you use the actual values. Example
root=/dev/sda1 - means first scsi hard drive first partition
root=/dev/sdb3 - means second scsi hard drive third partition.

You will need to know your partition layout. It sounds confusing at first, but once use to it, this is very powerful.

my linux distribution is on my parallel ATA drive. The only thing that's on the serial drive is my most recent installation of windows. I think that everything is referring to the correct partitions, at least extrapolating from my fstab.

Speaking of fstab, I figured I'd post it if it would be any help:

sda1 is what _should_ be a windows drive on a serial ATA raid.

/dev/hdc6 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/sda1 /data1 auto noauto,user 0 0
/dev/hdc1 /windows/C ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/hdc2 /windows/D ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/hdc3 /windows/E ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/hdc5 swap swap pri=42 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
/dev/cdrecorder /media/cdrecorder subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/dvdrecorder /media/dvdrecorder subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy subfs noauto,fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid,sync 0 0

It looks like everything is correct, so you must have a corrupt mbr. If you can get to a command line type in
as root, then try to recover Xp in the usual way with fixmbr.

when attempting fdisk /mbr I got the message
"Unable to open /mbr"
I attempted to run this as root in linux.