unexpected grub breakage

[Lonni J Friedman]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 10:34 AM, Doug Hunley <doug.hunley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 10:22, Lonni J Friedman <netllama at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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?
>
> Correct
>
>>  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?
>
> they are 500Gb each, they were used elsewhere, not sure what's on them
> though i believe it's an lvm container (or whatever the word is, I
> dont have lvm on this box)

i'd suggest that you overwrite zeros on the  first and last 1MB of
each disk.  this can easily be done with dd, something like (adjust
the of to whatever your actual disks are):
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb count=1 bs=1M skip=$(( $(blockdev --getsz
/dev/sdb) - 1024 ))
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb count=1 bs=1M

it might even be sufficient to just manually delete any partitions on
the disks, although that may not be any faster than just using dd to
nullify them.

i've seen cases where old disks with wacky storage/partitioning and/or
bootloader setups got picked up when GRUB scanned all the disks (yes,
it actually does scan every disk in the system, even if its config
only points to 1).  this is supposedly something that was "fixed" in
GRUB2.

>
>>
>> What does your grub configuration file look like (grub.conf, menu.lst
>> or wtf your distro uses to configure grub)?
>
> cat /boot/grub/grub.conf:
> default 0
> timeout 10
>
> splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/tux.xpm.gz
>
> title=Linux (3.3.2-gentoo)
> root (hd0,0)
> kernel /vmlinuz-3.3.2-gentoo quiet fastboot root=/dev/md127
>
> title=Linux (3.3.1-gentoo)
> root (hd0,0)
> kernel /vmlinuz-3.3.1-gentoo quiet fastboot root=/dev/md127
>
>> Where in the SBIOS boot order is the new RAID controller, and where
>> are the pre-existing disks?
>
> dead last cuz that's where i put it to be ;)

that was a two part question.  you answered one part (and its not
clear which part).


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