Problem booting a linux (RAID5)

Applications Filesystems, Disks and Memory
1

Hello, we have a problem with our system, a machine with a RAID5:

  • We can boot the system from CD only, if we try to boot from hard-disk the GRUB seems to be "freezed". What is the difference, why we can boot from CD if something is wrong?

  • Allways we retreive an error like: "raid array is not clean" when the system is booting (from CD). Could be this error related with the boot problem?

The problem is the same with a Ubuntu and a Fedora distros. Any ideas, please?

Thank you in advanced. Best regards.

2

Are you using software or Hardware RAID? If it's software RAID, is it LVM or MD ?
Have you tried using a System Rescue CD to scan and fix the software RAID device?

If it's hardware RAID, what controller and drivers are you using? Did you update the initrd to work with the drivers? Did you go into the BIOS to do a scan or rebuild?

3

Of course: sorry, i'm newbie in this issues! It's a hardware RAID, the master is a Serial ATA disk, and the rest are 8 IDE disks.

I'm gonna try to install and start the system just with the Serial ATA disk, with the IDE disks unplugged, and see what happens.

Thank you for your help!!!

4

After you do that, disable the automount for the RAID device (/etc/fstab), reconnect the hardware devices, reboot, and try to mount in manually.

5

OK, more information, the BIOS order of our HDs is:

4 IDE HD plugged to the MB

4 IDE HD plugged to the controller

1 SATA

We can boot the system form hard disk with an installation of a Ubuntu Server in the SATA, with the IDE HDs disconnected.

Then, if we reconnect the IDE HDs, when we try to reboot the machine we retrieve an "error 15", the GRUB seems to be "freezed", and we are only able to reboot from CD.

I think the GRUB don't understand our BIOS configuration, is this possible?

Thank you very much.

6

Problem solved. The problem was our buggy BIOS, so i think GRUB takes a wrong information. Now we have the system installed with the RAID5 enabled and with the proper configuration.

Thankx for your help!!!

7

Of course, it could be a buggy system BIOS and Grub is taking... oh, you figured that out. :wink: