RAID driving me nuts!

[MattHarwood]

Hi all,

Traditionally, I'm a software guy, and I'm not too hot hardware wise. So, of course, I decided to have a mess around..

We have an old decommissioned server that had Server 03 on it. I wanted to set it up as a box for me to "play around" with, and stuck an Ubuntu disk in and installed, totally forgetting it was configured with RAID (which type of RAID I'm unsure of).

I reboot after installation, and the boot process now hangs after "registering" ports 1 and 2 (the two drives I imagine?). It won't enter the BIOS setup, or boot menu, or anything. I've tried to take the CMOS battery out, but it's jammed in a really hard place and I'm sure I'll break something...

Could anyone suggest ideas please? I'm a little out of my depth here!

Many thanks!!

[dhicks]

I reboot after installation, and the boot process now hangs after "registering" ports 1 and 2 (the two drives I imagine?).

What part of the boot process is doing the registering - the BIOS for the computer, the BIOS of your RAID card or Ubuntu? I imagine it might be a hardware RAID card that you can see a message from, telling you that it's found two drives. If it is indeed a proper hardware RAID card then Ubuntu should see that RAID array as a simple harddrive, it shouldn't know that it's actually two mirrored drives. It might be that you need to provide Ubuntu with a driver for the RAID card, or it could be that GRUB, the bootloader that loads before Ubuntu itself, has got confused as to what it's booting in what order. I seem to remember Ubuntu messing up the drive order on installation and writing the boot loader to the wrong harddrive, that might be your problem.

You could try taking the RAID card out and connecting the drives straight to the motherboard - Ubuntu will handle a software RAID array if you want. At least look up the model number of the RAID card and find out if it's a hardware RAID card or otherwise.

[Davit2005]

So I take it it will not finish POST.

I'd go into the Raid config tool and see what the disks are set up as. As the server is just a experiment/toy anyway it doesn't really matter if you break the configuration of the raid. You should be able to find out what the disks are setup as.

Are they hot plug drives, or are they internal (individually connected by a SCSI ribbon cable) do you see any light activity on the drives?

[MattHarwood]

Thanks for the replies!

I forgot to mention this is a hardware RAID, but the case is such a mess I can't quite see the RAID card through the clumps of dust just yet...

From what you've both said I have a niggling feeling I installed grub to the incorrect drive. Where should I of put it? I put it on /dev/sda (Port 0).

The RAID controller finds and registers the drives fine, or as far as I can tell, it feels like it just doesn't know what to do after.

I can't get in to the RAID config tool or any other menu - I press the keys but it does nothing (or, more accurately, I think the menus tend to appear after the point at where it hangs)

Thanks again, would really like to figure this out.. learning curves ey!

[dhicks]

I forgot to mention this is a hardware RAID

It might well be a dedicated RAID card, but that card could well rely on the processor to do the actual work - so called "fake RAID" that needs a driver of some kind for the operating system (generall Windows only).

From what you've both said I have a niggling feeling I installed grub to the incorrect drive. Where should I of put it? I put it on /dev/sda (Port 0).

I seem to remember Ubuntu's installer having a tendancy to enumerate disks in a different order to GRUB. Grub lables disk Disk 0, Disk 1, etc, whereas Ubuntu / Linux in general seems them as sda, sdb, etc. sda doesn't neccesarily match up as being Disk 0.

[MattHarwood]

Appreciate the help, David!

I'm pretty sure it is "fake RAID" now, after realising the card I thought I saw was definitely not RAID related (told you I was a hardware noob! ;-) )

I've took the CMOS battery out for a little while and I can now get in to BIOS settings, choose drives to boot, and boot from CD again! However, when booting to either HDD I just get a blinking cursor and no action.

I've tried to install Fedora instead now, and I made a boot partition on sda. I still get the blinking cursor when choosing either drive to boot.

So we're nearly there (by the feel of it!) but it just wont boot the OS.. any ideas?

Thanks again