RAID-1 boot partition and FC2->FC4 upgrade

[Jack Howarth]

Aleksandar,
    I found your posting at...
                                                                                
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2005-March/msg05935.html
                                                                                
concerning the proper handling of a RAID-1 boot partition under grub.
Could you clarify a few issues on this. I found that anaconda in FC4
could find all of my md partitions on my FC2 installation and mounted
them. I have md0 as /boot, md1 as /, md2 as /var and md3 as swap
and md4 as /home. The associated disk partitions are sdb1/sda1 with md0,
sdb2/sda2 with md1, sdb3/sda3 with md2, sdb5/sda5 with md3 and
and sdb6/sda6 with md4, Unfortunately anaconda in FC4 can't find the
boot loader to update. From your posting I suspect this may because I
have a grub.conf with...
                                                                                
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Fedora Core (2.6.10-1.771_FC2smp)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.10-1.771_FC2smp ro root=/dev/md1 rhgb quiet
        initrd /initrd-2.6.10-1.771_FC2smp.img
                                                                                
..etc. I recall installing grub on each hd0 and hd1 partition manually
but could never get both of the drives to boot. Is it correct to assume
that the problem is the root line in the grub entries? From your
article it seemed that I should be deleting the lines with...
                                               
        root (hd0,0)
                    
from grub.conf so that the boot partition is autodetected and then
recreate both mbrs with...
                                                  
grub
install --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 (hd0,0)/grub/stage1 (hd0) \
      (hd0,0)/grub/stage2 p (hd0,0)/grub/grub.conf
install --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 (hd1,0)/grub/stage1 (hd1) \
      (hd1,0)/grub/stage2 p (hd1,0)/grub/grub.conf
                                                      
...to allow each drive to boot if the other fails. I have a
a sfdisk output of...
                                                      
# partition table of /dev/sda
...to allow each drive to boot if the other fails. I have a
a sfdisk output of...
                                                                                
# partition table of /dev/sda
unit: sectors
 
/dev/sda1 : start=       63, size=   208782, Id=fd, bootable
/dev/sda2 : start=   208845, size= 61432560, Id=fd
/dev/sda3 : start= 61641405, size=  6136830, Id=fd
/dev/sda4 : start= 67778235, size=166658310, Id= f
/dev/sda5 : start= 67778298, size=  4096512, Id=fd
/dev/sda6 : start= 71874873, size=162561672, Id=fd
 
...though. This confuses me with regard to your description
of the (hd0,0) being the partition number. I have been
booting with 'root (hd0,0)' in grub.conf despite the boot
partition being on sda1/sdb1. Is the 0 partition the MBR
and not listed by sfdisk? I just wanted to be clear that
I should use 0 for the partition in the grub commands above.
Thanks in advance for any clarifications. I am hoping that
if I make the above changes that anaconda will start recognizing
the boot partition to update during the installation. Or is
that yet another problem to solve beyond making grub.conf
disk independent?
                     Jack