Re: PATCH: allow installing grub on the MBR if /boot is on mdraid.

[Hans de Goede <hdegoede redhat com>]

Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-12-01 at 18:58 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
> > You are right studying the code further this does indeed happen. And installing 
> > to the first sector of the raid set partitions should be fine, assuming that 
> > the disk has a dos like mbr which just bootstraps to the bootsector of the 
> > active partition, but what if the disk does not have a valid mbr?
>
> This has come up from time to time.  One answer is that if we don't
> detect something that looks like an MBR and we're doing this (or any
> install /boot partition type installs), we should overwrite with a
> "real" MBR.  The problem is that this could trample over some other boot
> loaders which has been something we haven't been willing to do in the
> past.  Maybe we should pop up a warning and default to doing so, but
> give a way out if the user knows that they have a valid reason.  Even
> though I hate those sorts of things :/

I vote for just defaulting to installing on the MBR even in the raid1 case, if 
the user wants the redundancy one gets from installing into the mdraid 
partition, they can still easily select that. The user needs to have either a 
special BIOS, or needs to modify the BIOS settings and / or remove the disk 
when it died, which all require a very experienced user. I don't think it is to 
much to ask this special group of users to change the selection from install to 
mbr to install to partition during install if they want the additional 
redundancy this gives.

Regards,

Hans