ALERT! UUID=62b70d9d-685f-47dc-8433-372a0152b80c does not exist. Dropping to shell!

[kiplingw]

Hey forum,

I have UEFI disabled in the BIOS. I have two RAID1 arrays. One for boot / root and the other for home. I installed Ubuntu Server 17.10 successfully on the RAID1 arrays.

I was mucking around with the package manager and I may have broke grub. When I boot, the system drops to initramfs and displays:

ALERT! UUID=62b70d9d-685f-47dc-8433-372a0152b80c does not exist. Dropping to shell!

That UUID is I recall is of the boot / root partition on /dev/md0. /dev/sd{a,b} form the first RAID1 array and /dev/sd{c,d} for the second RAID1 array with the home drive. When the system bails to initramfs shell, I run blkid and i see the individual drives, but not assembled into mdadm arrays. Examining cat /proc/mdstat also confirms nothing is assembled.

From the Live USB stick, I tried running the following, but grub-install gives a weird error:

$ sudo grub-install /dev/sda
Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: error: failed to get canonical path of `/cow'.

Any help appreciated.

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[oldfred]

I do not know RAID.
But /cow is copy on write or the live installer which you cannot write to.
Or you attempted to install grub to live installer not your drive(s).

You have to mount / (root) and /boot if a separate partition, and ESP if UEFI, then you can install grub. Often easier with Boot-Repair but not sure how well it works with RAID.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Gr..._Broken_System

[kiplingw]

I do not know RAID.
But /cow is copy on write or the live installer which you cannot write to.
Or you attempted to install grub to live installer not your drive(s).

You have to mount / (root) and /boot if a separate partition, and ESP if UEFI, then you can install grub. Often easier with Boot-Repair but not sure how well it works with RAID.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Gr..._Broken_System

Thanks oldfred. What I did was I reinstalled the system / root partition on the first raid array using the Ubuntu Server installer. It re-installed grub correctly. What I think happened was I had accidentally installed one of the shim secure boot and grub efi packages which broke the system because I have secure boot and UEFI disabled in the bios.