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View Full Version : [kubuntu] Kubuntu installation w/RAID1 results in GRUB Error 17?



josh2112
November 15th, 2008, 11:48 PM
I am trying to install Kubuntu with a RAID1 array based on the excellent instructions at http://users.piuha.net/martti/comp/ubuntu/en/raid.html.

I have two 750 GB disks and I want to partition them like so:

20 GB - ext3 - root (mount point "/")
329 GB - ext3 - home (mount point "/home")
400 GB - xfs - mythtv recordings (mount point "/mythtv-recordings")
1 GB - swap

The first three partitions are going to be RAID1. The swap I don't care about, each disk can have it's own swap as far as I'm concerned.

I'm using Kubuntu 8.04.1 Alternate for amd64. I create the four partitions identically on each disk, marking the first 3 as "physical volume for RAID", and making sure the first partition on each disk is marked bootable. I then create the RAID arrays (interestingly enough, the installer RAIDed the first two partitions automatically for me but I had to create the xfs RAID array manually).

Everything looks fine, the install finishes, then when I reboot I'm presented with a GRUB error 17 - cannot mount the partition. I see that the GRUB entry the installer set up is setting the root to "/dev/md0". Setting it to "/dev/sda" doesn't help.

I've spent all day on this, tried it 2 different ways, done 4 different installs, and I'm still not getting anywhere. Why is this so hard? And what is the easiest way to accomplish what I want done? Would it be easier to just install the system on one disk, then make a RAID array later? And if so, how do I do that??

Thanks,
Josh

josh2112
December 2nd, 2008, 04:00 PM
If anyone's interested, I have gotten around this... although I still don't know what caused it in the first place.

In the Kubuntu Alternate installer, I created all the partitions but only created ONE raid1 array - 20GB ext3 mounted as '/' - and installed to that. After a successful boot up, I created the other two raid1 arrays manually using mdadm.

This wasn't quite as easy as it sounds, since /home had been created under root, so I had to move the contents over to the second raid1 array after creating it... and of course, add /etc/fstab entries for both of the new arrays.

Still don't know why the installer had such problems with creating all three raid1 arrays at once...