Can't install boot loader using Raid 0 on VT8237 [Solved]

daBron · n00b Joined: 06 Jan 2005 Posts: 8 Location: Bend, OR

My goal has been to get my system set up as dual boot (XP/Gentoo) using my BIOS's RAID 0. I've been working on getting it all setup for a couple of weeks now. And after much googling, reading through forums, and a lot of trial and error, I have my system running with both Gentoo and XP installed. The only thing holding me back right now is that I'm not able to install a boot loader!

My Setup:

Asus A7V600 (Latest BIOS #1008)
2 x Raptor 36G SATA
RAID 0 on Via VT8237
Windows XP Pro / Gentoo 2004.3

I first installed XP and created all my partitions at that time. Then I used the Gentoo LiveCD to change the partition types to Linux (85/83/82).

Here are my partitions:
/dev/mapper/rd1 -> /mnt/xp (40G)
/dev/mapper/rd5 -> /boot (100M)
/dev/mapper/rd6 -> swap (2G)
/dev/mapper/rd7 -> / (30G)

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2005 8:20 pm Post subject:

daBron,

Grub on RAID 0 is a non starter and with BIOS software RAID, so you can dual boot. its extra pain. I looked into it then decided I didn't need dual boot so I didn't need BIOS software RAID either.

A grub boot is three stages. The stage 1 is loaded from the the MBR and fetches and runs the stage 1.5 using BIOS calls. This lives on disc just following the MBR and before the first partition starts.
This runs and knows how to read the filesystem to find stage 2 but it has no idea about RAID, so it fall in a heap here. It cannot use the kernel as its not yet loaded. Scratch Grub.

Lilo plants block lists for the things it loads and depends much more on the BIOS, which is why you need to rerun lilo when you change its config or add things to /boot. The block lists must be updated.
This would work but ...
The kernel cannot mount the root partttion becase the block driver for the BIOS RAID is not in the kerenel. Therfore you have to make an initrd so the kernel can load the modules to read the root partition.
There is more here http://www.infowares.com/linux/
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

AnonNomis · n00b Joined: 18 Apr 2002 Posts: 28

DaBron,
I've been trying to do the same thing on a Asus A8V using the promise controller. I have pretty much the exact same setup with Windows XP on the first partition in the raid 0 array and Gentoo installed on logical partitions on the rest of the array. My set up is pretty much the same as yours because I used your post as a guide. Thanks for helping get this far. Now I'm stuck exactly where you were. I've been trying to set up a ramdisk as suggested but am not having any success. I was wondering if you got this to work. I set up an initrd file to be loaded from grub or lilo but I still cannot install either because my chooted environment doesn't see /dev/mapper/rd5 (the /boot partition that was originally created) and the original environment from the livecd doesn't have /sbin/lilo or grub. How did you get around this?

daBron · n00b Joined: 06 Jan 2005 Posts: 8 Location: Bend, OR

After finding this page in google: https://www.redhat.com/archives/dm-devel/2003-November/msg00007.html, I decided to manually tell LILO about the hardware geometry.

daBron · n00b Joined: 06 Jan 2005 Posts: 8 Location: Bend, OR

Success!!!

After weeks of searching and failed attempts, I finally can dual boot Gentoo/WinXP on my Bios Raid 0 VT8237!

Hopefully I can remember everything I had to do in order to get things working. If something I say doesn't work, let me know, I probably ran into the same issue and just forgot to write that step.

Here goes:

1. Patch LILO:

irondog · Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2005 12:12 am Post subject:

Good job!

To make some things more clear about this subject I would like to add some information to this topic.

about Lilo and Grub:

myrthas · n00b Joined: 16 Jan 2005 Posts: 1

anderlin · Posted: Mon Jan 17, 2005 8:27 am Post subject:

I did it this way:

1. Install windows xp (64bit in my case) on the first partition. It would not let me install it on any other partition (I don't know why)
2. Make all the partitions from windows (I also made a little unused space at the end, because I read the metadata was placed there. I don't know if this is necessary)
3. Boot 2004.1 livecd (the only one that works for my hardware) (the cd gen2dmraid-99.iso would not let me chroot)
4. Use dmsetup and the guide on https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=244941. Then copy with "cp -R /dev/mapper /mnt/gentoo/dev"
5. Format and mount partitions.
6. Continue ordinary installation.
7. Do something clever with the bootloader (I haven't figured it out. Since I use 64bit, grub is my only option)

anderlin · Posted: Mon Jan 17, 2005 2:38 pm Post subject:

I now have grub loading windows, and the gentoo kernel. However the kernel panics:

daBron · n00b Joined: 06 Jan 2005 Posts: 8 Location: Bend, OR

I used basically the same steps as anderlin described above:

1) First I created the raid array in the raid bios, which comes up right after the regular bios screen. For me I have to hit TAB to get into it. I set everything up as RAID 0 with 32K stripes.

2) I created all my partions using the WinXP install disk (had to insert a floppy w/ raid drivers and press F6) and then only formatted the first partition with NTFS and installed WinXP on it. It should be safe to use up the whole drive. Windows won't let you overwrite the metadata at the end of the drive, which is why we're using it to make our partitions in the first place.

When I'm in Windows I use TweakUI to hide the Linux partitions (D:,E:,F:) from Windows, so that I can't accidently format them.

3) Next I boot from the Gentoo LiveCD and use sfdisk to find the sector info for my partitions and away we go with what I've posted above.

anderlin, are you running BIOS RAID 0? If so, did you have to do anything special to get GRUB to install? I've gotten the patched version of LILO working, but still not GRUB.
_________________
"One by one the penguins steal my sanity!"

anderlin · Posted: Fri Jan 21, 2005 12:00 am Post subject:

I am running BIOS raid 0. For details on how I did it, look here:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=1996658#1996658

Please ask again if anything is unclear.

daBron · n00b Joined: 06 Jan 2005 Posts: 8 Location: Bend, OR

I was looking for differences between our setups, and I think that you were able to install GRUB just fine because you had /boot as your first partition. I looked at some more GRUB documention though and finally figured out how to tell it about my RAID's geometry.

daBron · n00b Joined: 06 Jan 2005 Posts: 8 Location: Bend, OR

Actually I still haven't been able to get GRUB to boot into Windows. I was able to boot into Gentoo and figured GRUB was working just fine. When I choose Windows in GRUB I get: "Error 12: Invalid device". Any ideas?

If anyone has a simillar setup to mine, what does your grub.conf look like? In addition to my grub.conf from my previous post I've tried:

jroo · n00b Joined: 06 Mar 2005 Posts: 52 Location: Finland

I can't connect to http://tienstra4.flatnet.tudelft.nl/~gerte/gen2dmraid/lilo-22.6-dmraid.patch and get the patch. Could someone put that patch somewhere where I can grab it (I tried to google for that patch with no results other than the link posted here)

thanks