moin moin,

I bought some new drives and plan on moving to a RAID setup with them and
move my current drives off to my backup server[0].

Short Version:

I can't get my new drives to boot. The first stage for grub doesn't load.
I used grub-install in an attempt to set the new drives up for booting.

sda is one of the new drives.

I tried the following.

grub-install /dev/sda
grub-install /dev/sda1

Any suggestions for something I'm missing?

I did try specifying the root-directory. I also started grub and used the
tab completion[1] to look at what grub thought was on the system. I also
tried installing on a fresh box and letting Ubuntu setup grub.

All those failed :(.

Long Version:

I created a 20GB primary partition at the beginning of each of the drives,
the same as the current setup. I then setup the rest of the drive as Linux
RAID.

The original drive was sda. With two new drives it became sdb and the new
drives were sda and sdc. I adjusted fstab in order to boot.

I copied / to sda1 and /home to sdc1 in order to transition to the new
drives. I then removed the old drive and inserted a 3rd drive to finish
off the RAID 5 ( fourth drive is currently being used for backups, but
will move to being a spare ).

With all 3 drives in it was booting fine.

I ran "grub-install /dev/sda", disconnected the old drive and tried to
boot. The primary stage for grub didn't come up :(. It just went to a
flashing line in the upper left corner of the monitors. It was partially
off the screen at the top.

Hitting return, <esc>, <del>, <F{1-5}> didn't change anything.

Powered off, reconnected the old hard drive and booted. Tried
"grub-install /dev/sda1", shutdown, disconnected old drive. Same problem
upon booting.

Wash, repeat with various permutations including things like "grub-install
--root-directory /mnt /dev/sda1" with sda1 mounted on /mnt and
"grub-install /dev/sdc1" in case the new drives are showing up in opposite
order in grub.

I did use tab completion in grub to verify which drives were which, but
since sda and sdc were the same it was possible that grub was seeing them
backwards in relation to what the OS sees.

I also tried using Ubuntu Live and install CDs. Is there a way to tell
them to boot the filesystem on the hard drive? It looks like they dropped
support for that :(.

I finally removed the old drive altogether and put in the 3rd new drive. I
then installed on the blank drive. I let the install install grub in the
boot sector and rebooted, but once again came the to blinking off-screen
cursor of nothingness :(. I tried several things including multiple
installs, but couldn't get the system to boot.

After seeing that the old drive ( installed by Red Seven where I got the
box ) has the 1.5 jumper set, I set it on the new drives as well, but
still the bosc :(. I finally put the original drive back in, but had to
disconnect all of the new drives in order to get it to boot :(.


[0] Everybody regularly makes backups, right?

[1] Found out about that over the weekend. Most cool. Saved me lots of
work in fixing something for a client as I could tab-complete to find all
the partitions from grub's point of view.

ciao,

der.hans
-- 
#  https://www.LuftHans.com/        http://www.CiscoLearning.org/
#  "So the environment is not a luxury ... It is an economically important
#  insurance policy whose wisdom we ignore at our peril."
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