Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 121164
grub hangs when booting from SATA RAID 0
Last modified: 2013-07-02 22:19:31 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040312 Description of problem: When booting from from an SATA RAID Configuration the GRUB Boot loader will only display "GRUB" and then the system will stop responding. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): grub-0.94-3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create a RAID 0 configuration with2 identical drives on VIA or Promise controller. 2. Install Fedora core 2 test2 for x86_64 with GRUB on /dev/sge1 3. Reboot the system after installation. Actual Results: "GRUB" (only the word without the quotes) will be displayed at the top of the screen and the system will stop responding Expected Results: The GRUB Boot menu should appear Additional info: This happens with The VIA VT8237 and the Promise PDC20378 Controllers on the Asus K8V Deluxe mainboard. 2 SATA WDC 160 GB Drives are connect to the controller, no other harddisk are present. The RAID Array is defined as boot.
Do you have the bios raid mode disabled ?
No the BIOS RAID mode is enabled (RAID 0) otherwise I will have 2 seperate SATA disks and configuration does work.
If you are in BIOS raid mode then the BIOS thinks your disk is striped as does the bios part of grub, while Linux thinks the disks are seperate disks. Needless to say this gets it rather confused
Then what is the proper way to configure Hardware RAID with FC2? Or can I only use software RAID ?
Most of the SATA "raid" is software raid, but handled by the bios/windows driver as Fedora does with the "md" driver. The vendors also tend not to give out formats. Its somehting Linux people are working on improving but right at this instant doesn't include a simple solution for using BIOS raid modes.
This would mean that the hardware RAID as described above is not supported in FC2 ? Or can it be done (Howto ?) ? I'm asking because I would guess the hardware raid would be faster. Will try the software RAID this weekend.
The VIA appears to be all software whatever the OS. Jeff has been doing some work on promise but I don't know what state it is in
has anything related to this bug been done or is somebody working on it as FC3 still does the same for me?
Disable the BIOS "raid" setting and it ought to behave
how should I boot when the Bios doesn't detect my drives ? At least my BIOS tells me "No Harddisks found" when disabling the sata bootrom in the BIOS.
The BIOS has no seperate setting for "RAID" v "non-RAID" /
I got exact same issue using MSI KT800 & SATA Raid 0 stripe. FC3 ran just fine on two consecutive drive spaces, but is not able to run on a stripe unless a driver option can be added perhaps?.FC4 Test 1 is similar.
An update has been released for Fedora Core 3 (kernel-2.6.12-1.1372_FC3) which may contain a fix for your problem. Please update to this new kernel, and report whether or not it fixes your problem. If you have updated to Fedora Core 4 since this bug was opened, and the problem still occurs with the latest updates for that release, please change the version field of this bug to 'fc4'. Thank you.
This bug has been automatically closed as part of a mass update. It had been in NEEDINFO state since July 2005. If this bug still exists in current errata kernels, please reopen this bug. There are a large number of inactive bugs in the database, and this is the only way to purge them. Thank you.