On Wed, 2004-08-18 at 10:19, Robin Laing wrote:
jludwig wrote:
On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 11:26, Robin Laing wrote:
Michael Mansour wrote:
Hi Robin,
Would it be possible to write the MBR to the second disk just in case? -- Robin Laing
Yes, I've tested this by removing the first drive and writing grub to the MBR of the second drive and it did work fine, although when putting the first drive back in there then I had the issue with two MBR's which got things a little confused.
Basically, what I learnt from that saga is that grub should only reside on one drive.
Michael.
I for one when I was a system admin, did not like getting called in at 03:00 due to a crash. And doesn't always seem to happen at 03:00 when things go bad? :)
I feel it should be there. Now if you do write it to the second disk and you have problems, this could be a problem.
-- Robin Laing
Many newer BIOS' will allow for booting off of a secondary drive.
If this is the case with your machine I would just load the second drive where it sits and just change the BIOS setting if necessary.
(I used to do this with SCSI and IDE for a duel boot system.)
This isn't the issue.
As stated by Michael, having Grub on the second drive caused problems. My point was in a situation where your /boot is actually part of a Raid array, and the second drive "cannot have Grub on it" then it isn't much use in an emergency as you will have to have a copy of the MBR to update your second drive.
Is this an issue with RAID or Grub or the Bios?
-- Robin Laing
If I remember correctly grub can be on both and chain loaded, but, if your first drive has issues and can't start grub you're dead.
I think Nigel Wade made a good point that LILO is RAID aware while GRUB isn't.
If GRUB is going to be the default installation, it should be made RAID aware. Maybe with a menu option to select a different drive in a recovery mode?
I do agree that changing the drive is one way around the problem but Michael stated that he had problems when the MBR was mirrored on both drives. I deleted his latest message so I cannot refer to it.
As stated earlier. I don't use RAID for my boot drive but others do and this is/could be an issue for them. He did state that we was going to go to hardware raid.
-- Robin Laing
