On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 19:15:49 -0600, Laurence Vanek <lvanek@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Surprise! boot hangs, cant find partitions on hda (of course not). > drops me to simple shell. That is an odd error message. The raid devices should have names like /dev/md0 and only those names should appear in /etc/fstab. Grub refers to drive numbers, not letters, so I am wondering what is giving you that message. There are a couple of things that can cause problems. If you lost the only disk that grub was installed on (grub works with raw partitions and doesn't know about raid) then you will need to boot from a rescue CD to fix things up. Even if you made sure that grub was installed on multiple disks you still have to worry about hard drive order as after grub starts booting from the MBR of a device it finishes using a named (by hard drive order) hard drive and if that drive doesn't have what is expected on it (because that drive was lost or drives don't have the number expected after one was removed) the system won't boot. Unfortunately grub doesn't seem to have a way to say finish booting using the same drive you started on. (In my case I only have two drives, so I can just set them both to use drive 0 and be able to easily get things working with either one drive or with one drive replaced.) No matter what has happened, you should be able to fix things up by booting from the rescue CD. You should be able to repartition the new hda and use mdadm to add the partitions back into the appropiate mirrors.
