[mythtv-users] Grub problem - or I have a special place in my version of hell reserved for Seagate

Hika van den Hoven hikavdh at gmail.com
Wed Aug 3 16:40:25 UTC 2016


Hoi Simon,

Wednesday, August 3, 2016, 5:58:32 PM, you wrote:

> So on Monday I spent a chunk of the day at work dealing with the
> effects of a disk drive failure (yes, a Seagate) that "just stopped working".
> Then I get home, and I'm trying to deal with the problems I made
> while trying to replace the HD in SWMBO's laptop with an SSD.
> And while doing that, I get emails from my Mythtv server about raid
> errors ... you've guessed it, a Seagate drive failed.
> Yes I've had WD fail - but they at least fail "gracefully" with bad
> blocks, I don't recall ever having had one "just stop working".

> Now, apart from it being 3TB and nearly full, should be no problem.
> The OS etc are RAID1 with another drive, so should be a matter of
> pull the failed drive, reboot, and later see if I can get anything off the dead drive.
> Would it reboot, would it ****

> Drag the system from where it normally lives - sans monitor etc and try again. No, it won't boot.

> Now, I have a hard disk with MBR partitioning, 4 partitions for MD
> raid volumes, all raid1 with partitions one one of my storage drives
> - not ideal, but the SSD I did have in there failed.
> There should be no problem - when I installed the drive I did a
> "grub-install /dev/sda" and the system did in fact boot fine with a
> currently working drive as the primary drive. Will it boot now, will
> it ****. Goes through the BIOS screens, and at the point when Grub
> should pop up, I get a blank screen with a blinking underline.

> So I grab the USB stick I use when I'm testing stuff, it boots
> fine, I can build the arrays (in degraded mode), mount the volumes -
> but can't chroot and do anything, ah, my USB stick is i386 and this system is AMD64.

> Check on my laptop, yes I've got an image for Wheezy AMD65 - just
> need to burn it to CD. Ah, the cable I need for the external CD is
> in use (remember I was trying to fix the self-inflicted problems
> with SWMBO's laptop ?) and the external drive won't work with just
> any old cable. So sod that for tonight.

> Yesterday evening. Burn a CD, it fails verify. Give CD a clean and
> have another go - eventually it works. Boot system from it, find
> that if I manually assemble the arrays, they will work, mount, I can
> chroot to the system's root (using the recovery mode on the CD), and
> both update-grub and grub-install /dev/sda work.
> Reboot. Same black screen with blinking cursor taunting me.

> Ah, thinks I. If I get into Grub's menu, I can manually type a load
> of sh*t (I've got a copy of grub.cfg from backups) and get a live
> system booted. But of course, these CDs/USB sticks don't use grub. Aaaaaaaaaahhhhh. Go to bed.

> I'm thinking the best option now is to install a minimal system on
> another disk, boot from that, then I can try doing some chroot foo
> and see if I can get this thing to work properly. Any other thoughts

> _______________________________________________

When you boot from raid you must copy your boot record to both disks.
I do not know the GRUB commands as I use lilo, (so much easier in this
kind of situation). In lilo I add at the top:

boot=/dev/md10
raid-extra-boot=mbr-only

and I can boot from either disk!

Tot mails,
  Hika                            mailto:hikavdh at gmail.com

"Zonder hoop kun je niet leven
Zonder leven is er geen hoop
Het eeuwige dilemma
Zeker als je hoop moet vernietigen om te kunnen overleven!"

De lerende Mens



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