unexpected grub breakage

[Lonni J Friedman]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 6:16 AM, Doug Hunley <doug.hunley at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, I realize there is a *lot* of redundancy in that subject ;)
>
> I'm running Grub legacy (1.x) and it worked perfectly until yesterday.
> For the longest time now, I've had four WD SATA drives in my
> workstation. They are split into a 100Mb RAID1 and a RAID5 taking up
> all the rest of the space. Grub's /boot partition is on the RAID1,
> while / is on the RAID5. Like I said it all works fine.
>
> However, I bought a Highpoint PCI-X RAID controller, stuck it into the
> system and cabled it to an external SATA enclosure, and Grub breaks. I
> reboot, the BIOS sees the new controller, the controller sees the new
> drives I've attached, and then I see 'Loading Grub' and then 'Loading
> Grub state 1.5' comes up and that's where it stops. Just completely
> sits there and does NOTHING.
>
> I discovered that if I kill the power to the external enclosure,
> everything boots normally. My BIOS sees the controller, the controller
> sees that there are *no* drives attached to it, and Grub boots off the
> RAID1 without issue and loads my system off the RAID5.
>
> Anyone have any idea why in the hell Grub would hang when the external
> drives are present?
>
> * All RAID above is "md" or "software" RAID

Just so that I'm clear, you're saying that you're *adding* new drives
with this Highpoint RAID controller, and you're *not* moving the
pre-existing drives to the Highpoint RAID controller?  If so, how
large are these new disks, and are they really new blank disks, or
were they previously used for some other purpose, and potentially have
old, unknown mystery data on them?

What does your grub configuration file look like (grub.conf, menu.lst
or wtf your distro uses to configure grub)?
Where in the SBIOS boot order is the new RAID controller, and where
are the pre-existing disks?

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       https://netllama.linux-sxs.org