[Nottingham] Dual boot GRUB woes on RAID

Chris Stapleton cstapleton_osteo at hotmail.com
Mon May 23 10:52:59 UTC 2011


Hi all,I'm a reader of your mailing list but only very occasionally respond to NLUG, so I hope it's ok to ask you guys a question - any help much appreciated:
A friend of mine (it really is - not a way of saying me haha)  has got fed up with viruses/update trouble on his XP box, so decided to get into Linux at my suggestion. He's an ex Sys-Admin from years ago at Rolls Royce, so has some experience of the benefits of a real OS, but like most Windows users wants to keep Windows to run some programs.
His original XP drive has two partitions, that are in a RAID array, (not sure whether 1 or 0). Anyway, he has bought an extra drive, managed to install Natty on it, at the moment has GRUB on that second drive's MBR, so changes the boot order in the BIOS to switch between OS's. 
So my question: How do you get dual boot here? Natty didn't seem to recognise the first XP RAIDed disk during install - in fact it seems that to get it to install he had to use the nomodraid switch (or so he told me). I've asked him to send me the results of fdisk -l to see what his Natty install is aware of, but haven't heard back yet.
Now he has Natty installed on the second drive, he'd like to get GRUB working obviously so he doesn't have to go into BIOS to choose OS and can do it at boot as normal.  I have no experience of this, and don't know whether simply installing GRUB to sit on the MBR of /dev/sda will screw up the RAID array, whether that depends on if it is 0 or 1, or if there are other steps (I've read some stuff about using mdadm which I don't yet understand).
Any ideas (sorry for rambling message, and thanks for your help!)Best,Chris


 		 	   		  
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