unexpected grub breakage

[David A. Bandel]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 08:16, 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.

nice to hear GRUB _finally_ works on RAID (or does it? -- I think only
in case of GRUB2).  I still rip it out and use LILO.  Wait till you
see the new improve GRUB OS.  Includes firmware files and is bigger
than DOS 6.2 was.

>
> 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.

Yes.  You absolutely need to start using UUID identification.  Your
new drive became sda, and the old sda is not sdb.  Not important once
you change.  Easily done in LILO.  Can't help you w/ GRUB.

>
> 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.

yep  -- see above.

>
> Anyone have any idea why in the hell Grub would hang when the external
> drives are present?

Need to go to UUIDs.

>
> * All RAID above is "md" or "software" RAID

doesn't matter.  I believe GRUB legacy works w/ sda and sdb and not
md0.  Again, md0 will have a different UUID.

>
> --
> Douglas J Hunley (doug.hunley at gmail.com)
> Twitter: @hunleyd                                               Web:
> douglasjhunley.com
> G+: http://goo.gl/sajR3
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David A. Bandel
-- 
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not
sure about the the universe. -- Albert Einstein
Visit my web page at: http://david.bandel.us/