The new GRUB: A useful test!

[Paul Iadonisi]

  Okay, here's some useful (and promising) info on the latest grub.  My
test machine only has one disk, so it's kind of hard (though maybe not
impossible) to test to see if the newly fixed software RAID 1 problem
has truly been fixed.  But I do have a relatively unused, fully updated
FC3 machine that I'm using software RAID 1 on with two SCSI disks.  It
was an install (not upgrade) of FC3 where I set up /dev/md0 (/dev/sda1
and /dev/sdb1) as /boot and with the root and swap partitions being
logical volumes sliced from a volume group that has /dev/md1 as it's
only PV (which consist of /dev/sda2 and /dev/sdb2).
  I did an 'rpm -Fvh grub-0.95-12.i386.rpm' and then ran 'grub-install
--recheck /dev/md0', rebooted, and prepared to eat crow.  Thankfully, I
won't need to stuff myself with that obscure poultry dish.  (At least,
not yet. :-/)
  Writing it to /dev/md0 (/boot) is a bit odd, though, as normally when
installing to the boot sector, you like to install to a non-partition
device file, but the question is, how else can you do it when you've
added partitions to all your md devices and have no md devices with full
disk devices in it?  So installing to the device which contains /boot
probably is the most sane thing to do.  Question is, am I deceiving
myself?  Am I still actually using the old grub installed on the boot
sector of /dev/sda?
-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets

[Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams]

On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 21:44 -0400, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
>  Question is, am I deceiving
>  myself?  Am I still actually using the old grub installed on the boot
>  sector of /dev/sda? 
Restore the stock DOS MBR and find out.

-- 
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams <ivazquez(a)ivazquez.net&gt;
http://fedora.ivazquez.net/

gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key 38028b72

[Paul Iadonisi]

On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 22:12 -0400, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams wrote:
>  On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 21:44 -0400, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
>  > Question is, am I deceiving
>  > myself?  Am I still actually using the old grub installed on the boot
>  > sector of /dev/sda?
>  
>  Restore the stock DOS MBR and find out. 
  Not as easy as it sounds, but doable.  I was hoping to avoid that.
First, I must boot from DOS/WinXX bootable media and then FDISK/MBR.  So
now, how do I boot the FC3 install?  Looks like rescue mode is in order,
but since I don't usual install from optical media (I do network
installs almost exclusively), I *have* no rescue disk, currently.  Argh!
The things I have to go through to do a simple test.  Be back in a while
with results.

-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets

[Glen Kim]

On Wed, 13 Apr 2005, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams wrote:

>  On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 21:44 -0400, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
> > Question is, am I deceiving
> > myself?  Am I still actually using the old grub installed on the boot
> > sector of /dev/sda?
>
>  Restore the stock DOS MBR and find out.
>  
If that's too inconvenient, you can use the mbr.bin in the syslinux source 
distribution.

Glen.

[Mike Bird]

On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 18:44, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
>  Question is, am I deceiving myself?  Am I still actually using the
> old grub
>  installed on the boot sector of /dev/sda? 
Probably.  Take a working LILO system and do "grub-install --recheck
/dev/md0".  Look at the first few bytes of a physical drive and
you'll still see LILO, e.g.

# od -c /dev/hde | head -1
0000000   ë   H 220   l   b   a   L   I   L   O 001  \0 025 004   Z  \0

I expect you'll have to issue an install at the grub command line before
it touches the MBR.  I've been searching the grub docs for a definition
of the new RAID support and finding zilch.

--Mike Bird

[Paul Iadonisi]

  Whew!  I've been shocked and awed.  Thank goodness.  I hate crow ;-).
The DOS FDISK/MBR approach didn't work because my disks are SCSI and I
don't have the DOS SCSI drivers to see my disks (nor the inclination to
search for them).
  So I tried Mike Bird's suggestion and got lilo installed and rebooted
to be sure that lilo was, in fact, installed in the MBR correctly.  It
was, so I proceeded to the '/sbin/grub-install --recheck /dev/md0' and
lo and behold, the next boot was using grub once again.  This time most
definitely the new grub.  Another time, I'll try a fresh install of
FC4T? (when I'm sure I have everything I need extracted from this
system) with this same raid config and see if it works (which I suspect
will, but that will at least exercise the anaconda code).

-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets