LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Graham Smith <linuxsalist@sonicresolutions.com>
  To  : <davidn@rebel.net.au>
  Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 14:21:07 +1030

Re: /boot/grub/stage2 file changes magically.. very weird! (LONG post!)

> You've got two copies of the file, one good and one bad, as well as the
> file itself.  If the differences are nothing more than that one file
> then it'd be faster to "cp good-copy /boot/grub/stage2".  However I don't
> think your problems are solved.  I think whatever you're using to mirror
> the drives is buggy, or perhaps your hardware is faulty, and so you have
> a continuing problem.  In brief: what you're using is unreliable.  Next
> time (and there will be a next time) you probably will not be so lucky.

I have a feeling I only have myself to blame for this one.  Thinking back to
early December, my boot hard drive started to fail and so I replaced the
drive, repartitioned and let RAID do it's job.

After the boot and root partitions had re-synced I had to re-install grub
back into the MBR of the new drive.  When I attempted to re-install grub
from the live system, it complained about md0 not having a BIOS equivalent
and refused to install (obviously it's not too RAID friendly), it also
didn't like the idea of installing to hda1 either (at least while RAID was
running).

Anyway I got around that by booting off a grub floppy and doing the setup
from there which all worked fine.  Of course that fixed the MBR problem but
it was done outside of the raid environment.  Looking back through my daily
cron jobs, I found in the tripwire report of the day after this was done

Modified:
"/boot/grub/grub.conf"
"/boot/grub/stage2"

Looks like grub must have changed stage2 during the installation on the boot
floppy so I think that's what has put the two drives at odds with each
other.

Hopefully its sorted now (have recopied stage2 from a good source), although
I am still a bit suspect about the RAID code in this current kernel.  The
"raidhotremove" command fails with:

trying to remove hda1 from md1 ...
md: bug in file md.c, line 2341

That's not very re-assuring, I think it's time to update my kernel.. yet
again!!

Cheers,
Graham

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