Release Found: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3
Symptom:
When the first disk of a software RAID has been removed, the second drive is not bootable. Performing a grub-install fails with the error message: '/dev/hdx does not have any corresponding BIOS drive'.
Solution:
Please note that before performing any of these steps, you should have a recent backup of your important data. If for any reason the primary drive becomes unbootable, you should have your Red Hat Enterprise Linux CD #1 available in order to load the rescue environment.
If you are attempting to run
grub-install inside of a rescue environment, you will need to first manually mount the corresponding disk partitions. You can view the partitions with the command:
You need to mount any partitions of type Linux or Linux RAID autodetect. In the following example of
fdisk output, the
/boot partition is /dev/hda1 and the
/ partition is /dev/hda2:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 13 104391 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hda2 14 1288 10241437+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hda3 1289 1352 514080 82 Linux swap
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In this example, you would mount the partitions and
chroot using the following commands:
# mkdir /mnt/sysimage
# mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/sysimage
# mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/sysimage/boot
# chroot /mnt/sysimage
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The next step is to edit the file
/etc/grub.conf (which is a symbolic link to
/boot/grub/grub.conf). Uncomment the following line by removing the pound sign (#) at the beginning of the line:
from:
#boot=/dev/hda
to:
boot=/dev/hda
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Now, to make the drive bootable, GRUB must be installed to the master boot record (MBR) of the disk. To do this, execute the following command (as root) to enter a GRUB shell:
# grub --batch --device-map=/boot/grub/device.map
--config-file=/boot/grub/grub.conf --no-floppy
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Now, from the GRUB shell prompt, execute the following commands:
grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit
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The
setup command within this shell actually writes GRUB to the MBR, which makes the drive bootable.
