[Nottingham] Dual boot GRUB woes on RAID

[James of the family Moore]

I would concur with the replies given, by adding my own experience:
that being that bootloaders generally do not like softRAID of any
description. As I was experimenting with softRAID several years ago
(on a Promise Ultra ATA 100TX/2 RAID card), I discovered that I had to
create a dead zone partition for the bootloader (ie space reserved at
the top of the partition table on each drive in the array for a
partition on one drive just for the bootloader) otherwise I could only
use the array for data.

On 5/23/11, Martin <martin at ml1.co.uk> wrote:
> On 23 May 2011 12:18, Jason Irwin <jasonirwin73 at gmail.com> wrote:
> [---]
>>> 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.
>>
>> I’m an idiot, so my advice may be crap.
>
> Only the blind consider themselves infallible! ;-)
>
>> He is probably using fake-raid (some Intel trickery on the HDD controller,
>> I
>> have it and it is pretty common on home/low-end devices).  From when I did
>> my research for my RAID0 set-up, I found out that GRUB *does not* like
>> this.
>
> A good guess I'll agree as most likely...
>
>
> Rather than using the BIOS boot sequence to select between booting a
> particular drive, an alternative could be to always boot from grub on
> his second drive. Add into the grub menu a selection to "chain" to the
> MBR on the Windows drive to then go through the Windows bootloader
> there when wanted.
>
> A quick web search should give the grub details for chaining another
> bootloader/MBR. (The MBR must be accessible regardless of the
> fake-RAID.)
>
>
> And welcome to the list. Such questions are a good part of what the
> list and group are around for!
>
> Good luck,
> Martin
>
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