Software RAID-1 unable to boot degraded

keithk23 · 09-23-2006, 05:11 PM

I had my FC3 system setup with RAID-1 running fine until I noticed I was getting close to running out of disk space. I purchased new drives and got on my way. Replaced and sync'ed hdb without any issues. When I got to hda, I started losing my mind. I could not for the life of me get the system to boot without hda. After some playing around, I now can not get the system to boot on a single drive... both mirrors must be present to boot or I get the "GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB..." deal.

I've Google'd and this seems to be the fix...

Code:

on disk hda:
grub>root(hd0,0)
grub>setup(hd0)
grub>exit

and on hdb:
grub>root(hd1,0)
grub>setup(hd1)
grub>exit

... but no luck!

Anyone have any suggestions?
THANK YOU in advance!

thelostsaint · 09-26-2006, 12:05 AM

you can try booting off a live cd and use the same raid config to start the mirrors. that is of course if you remember what the raid config looks like. if you don't. try using the mdadm tool in examine mode to examine individual array to get the raid config.

keithk23 · 09-27-2006, 08:52 AM

I was really stuck since during this mess, I had a drive fail, so I could not boot my system at all. As a last ditch effort, I ran a "dd if=/dev/hdGOOD of=/dev/hdNEW"... Luck was on my side and I was able to boot once again. This probably is not the most effective and definitely not the most reliable method, but in a pinch I guess it would have to do!