Linux / Raid 1 / grub notes

Just went through this, thought I'd leave my experience here in case anyone runs into this in the future:

Scenario:
* Linux RHEL 3 system (not a dual boot!)
* RAID controller (Perc 4e/Si by LSI Logic), RAID 1 (2 disks mirrored)
* Repartitioning the /home partition to make it bigger

What happened:
Disk Director worked fine. It was easy to use and resized everything as I wanted. I committed the changes, and rebooted.

Upon reboot, I get "missing operating system".

I read in the manual that if I resized the boot partition inode sizes that it would mess up the boot loader. However, I did not do this but suspected that the boot loader was screwed up, since the start and end points of the boot partition might have been moved.

My system uses GRUB, and there is just no info on how to redo the boot loader. Here's what I did to remedy the issue (THANK YOU GOOGLE and RH Tech Support!):

1) Downloaded the latest RHEL 3 CD set (update 6 at the moment). I needed to do this because my older RHEL 3 CD set did not have the correct Megaraid2 drivers that is needed for the Linux setup routine to find the RAID controller and thus the drives.
2) Boot into RHEL 3 CD#1, booted "linux rescue"
3) The rescue routine loaded the megaraid2 drivers and found the lost partitions and my RH system installation, mounted it as /mnt/sysimage and gave me a shell to work on it. Here's what I did once I got into that shell:

# chroot /mnt/sysimage
# cd sbin
# grub
grub> find /grub/stage1
[It finds where the install is, in my case (hd0,2) ]
grub> root (hd0,2)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit

I then rebooted the system and everything is back to normal.

I am not sure if I need to recreate the journal files, or run efsck2 on the partitions. I'll be looking to that next.

I really hope no one will ever need this info, but if it helps you then it's worth my 5 mins of typing.

I gotta say, I like DD so far, it's got a nice GUI and is easy to use. I do wish you guys would give more documentation support for Linux users.

-gary

 

Hello Gary,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Partition and Disk Managing Software.

Thank you for your warm comments.
Sharing your experience is very much appreciated.

If you have any further experience to share, please feel free to post it on this forum.

Thank you.
--
Kirill Omelchenko