Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 111788
Multiple bugs related to installing on a RAID
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:34 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030630 Description of problem: I just tried to install Fedora Core 1 on a machine with 6 IDE disks in a RAID configuration. Per standard procedure I wanted /dev/md0 (RAID-1) to be /boot and the rest on /dev/md1 (RAID-5). The idea with having /boot as a RAID-1 is that any disk should be able to boot. The six drives are hda, hdd (really), hde, hdg, hdi, and hdk. Problem #1: The partition editor (disk druid?) did not see /dev/hdd. For whatever reason I could not convince disk druid to see /dev/hdd, even though I could switch to a shell and access /dev/hdd from there. Problem #2: The GRUB installation does not work. After letting FC install, the GRUB installation does not work on boot; it loads stage 2 and then gives a grub> prompt. Poking around at the GRUB command line one pretty soon discovers that GRUB is convinced there are no harddrives in the system whatsoever. Problem #3: After giving up on GRUB, I booted using SuperRescue, I ended up installing LILO manually. LILO insists that it doesn't understand "how to handle" /dev/hdi or /dev/hdk, but specifying "disk=/dev/hdi" "bios=0x84" or anything like that in /etc/lilo.conf makes LILO very unhappy: "duplicate geometry definition for /dev/hdi", However, it apparently installs on the first four drives anyway. However, booting in this configuration the system refuses to mount root, giving "error 22 mounting ext3". This is after installing all the relevant RAID and filesystem modules, so I don't think it's a missing module issue. Yet, /dev/md1 has a valid ext3 filesystem which can be read just fine... just not by the RedHat initrd apparently. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: See description. Additional info:
First off, having multiple things listed in the same bugs makes it impossible for me to ever track this properly :/ But 1) Is hdd a removable device in any way? anaconda doesn't allow installing to removable devices unless you boot with 'linux expert' 2) If grub doesn't see hard drives, that sounds a lot like BIOS problem, but without more information, it's nearly impossible to say. 3) Going beyond 0x83 isn't supported by LILO afaik, so you're going to lose trying to do this. When booting, please provide all of the messages from nash as its impossible for me to tell what's going on otherwise. Ensuring the drives are actually seen by the kernel would be helpful as well.
Confirmed fixed in FC2test3; if there are issues related to the boot loader in FC2test3 I will file a separate bug report.