On Mon, 30 Apr 2012, gregrwm wrote:
> sorry no experience with discs that big, but i'll offer my thoughts in
> case it helps. perhaps "grub-pc" ("grub2") just won't do it. i'd try
> "grub" next. if you need further options, then try lilo, then syslinux.
> but how do you "try" them? does that installer support "legacy grub"?
> probably not, or i would think you would have seen it as an option. it
> may be easiest to choose an installer (and the distro that goes with it)
> that supports your hardware. perhaps debian, perhaps centos, perhaps
> fedora, perhaps opensuse. or if you would rather stick with ubuntu, it
> may be easier to skip using an installer entirely, just prepare your
> raid, mkfs, unpack the core tar.gz, chroot into it, apt-get install grub
> (legacy), see if it boots, and apt-get install whatever else you want,
> eg whatever-desktop. all easy if the liveCD kernel supports your raid.
> if not you may need to install to a temporary small nonraid partition
> just to perform the rest of the manual install (then later reuse the
> temporary partition as part of raid swap or whatever). see
> help.ubuntu.com/12.04/installation-guide/amd64/linux-upgrade.html
Thanks for trying to help. Unfortunately, you don't have any suggestions
that would work for me because they seem to require a higher level of
technical knowledge than I have. For example, "try lilo, then syslinux"
was one suggestion, but I don't know how to do that, so I would have to
spend a bunch of time finding out how to do it, then time doing it, then
it probably won't work, or at least you don't seem to have any confidence
in it. At another point you give a long list of steps that I mostly don't
understand such as "unpack the core tar.gz" -- which I get from where? --
and end with "all easy if the liveCD kernel supports your raid," but the
Live CD does not work with the RAID, which is one of my problems.
But I really am grateful for your effort and you did give me a few ideas.
One problem I've had though, is that when I google for solutions, I get a
lot of what are essentially clues but without answers.
>From this list I did get one off-list reply that seems like a really good
lead. The person claimed that I need to create a /boot partition with ee
type and that I can use GPTfdisk. Apparently, GPTfdisk is in the Ubuntu
package gdisk. So maybe I can go back to the old RAID1 instructions that
B-o-B and I put together and just use GPTfdisk instead of fdisk, but with
a /boot partition of maybe 10MB, and then Ubuntu will install GRUB
automatically. I'm going to guess it will work. I'll let you all know.
Also, if that works, it would probably mean that I could have done my
installation back in October even more easily if I had only made a /boot
partition of the right type (ee). I've been going without the /boot
partition and just using /.
Mike