Grub on RAID and Configuration

I’ve been running grub for quite a long time on my machine, but when I rebooted the other day, I noticed that there’s currently a problem with the grub installation on my system: it doesn’t boot anymore! 😉

My machine has 3 drives, with an LVM for the data on a RAID5. Then there is another RAID1 for /boot. This worked all the years quite reliable with grub. Now grub complains that it can’t find the kernel anymore. The reason seems to be (from /boot/grub/grub.cfg):

echo    ‘Loading Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 …’
linux   /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-amd64 root=UUID=36213d56-67cf-428d-b801-4171fd9d6943 ro  vga=775
echo    ‘Loading initial ramdisk …’
initrd  /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-5-amd64

For some reason I don’t know there’s a /boot in front of /vmlinuz… which prevents loading the kernel. There’s a "set root='(md0)’" line in the config as well, but I assume that this is correct, because /dev/md0 is my /boot on RAID0. The rootfs is on /dev/md2, another RAID0. So, I can’t set root=’md2′ because there’s no /boot/grub directory in the first place.

When I editing the linux and initrd lines in the boot prompt and remove the /boot, everything is fine and my system boots up just fine.

Was there an intended change in grub-pc package that causes this behaviour or is ist just a plain bug?

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6 thoughts on “Grub on RAID and Configuration

    1. Nope. Negative. Maybe I
      Nope. Negative. Maybe I should have a look *again* at the BTS before writing such blog posts, but when I discovered this bug on Saturday morning, there was no bug report about that. So, when the bug report was not acknowledged and published before 2010-10-23 13:56:40 (which was when I rebooted last time), I was not able to see the bug. 🙂

  1. I gave up on grub-pc + RAID a
    I gave up on grub-pc + RAID a while ago. I really wish I would have pinned the last working version for me, but alas I didn’t. TBH, I have no idea of what the current state of affairs is, I simply sliced a potion of a swap partition off and made it /boot. I simply got tired of the periodic reboot of doom.

    grub-pc + RAID has had enough ‘random glorious failure potential’, off and on for years at this point, that the best thing to do is to purge your grub and kernel packages, and re-install them to a /boot on a common as mud device with a simple as possible file-system. Then wash your hands and try to keep down your lunch. 🙂

    1. You clearly haven’t used
      You clearly haven’t used GRUB2 in a long while. This hiccup was an exception to the rule of good grub support in an increasing number of setups, even without separate /boot.

  2. I “fixed” this by
    # cd

    I “fixed” this by
    # cd /boot
    # ln -s . boot

    There used to be such a link in old installations IIRC.

    Erich

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