debian, booting md, and you

2009.01.12

unlike centos, when you configure MD RAID 1 for booting on debian etch, it doesn’t install GRUB on all the drives in the set.  you can do this manually and it seems you’d have to do this every time you update the kernel.  (i found this out the hard way)

  • edit /boot/grub/menu.lst
  • find the line that says ‘root’ (maybe has (hd0,0) on it).  make note of the hdX,Y part
  • determine what your “other” drives in the RAID set are, whether they’re /dev/sdb, /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, etc.
    (i usually cat /proc/mdstat and see which disks are part of each mdX device)
  • run the following, replace hdX,Y with the one you found in menu.lst.  replace /dev/hdX with the device ID for your other drive.

    schitzo:~# grub
    grub> device (hd0) /dev/hdX
    grub> root (hdX,Y)
    grub> setup (hd0)
    grub> quit

if yours is RAID 1 like mine, you should only have to do this once.  it’s a higher level RAID, you’ll have to perform this on every drive

maybe they’ll fix this in lenny 🙂

(mostly for reference)

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