[Nottingham] setting up GRUB and RAIDed XP

Thu May 26 12:43:47 UTC 2011

Thanks to everyone for your replies, very useful, but due to my n00b status, I have little idea of how to tell GRUB to chainload the first drive, particularly when it is seeing / as on /dev/sda and an fdisk -l shows no other drives (fdisk /dev/sdb /-l also gave no results).
So...to simplify - does anyone know what steps to take to 'chainload' as has been suggested - i.e. keep grub on the linux disk,and but set it up to revert to the other drive when he wants XP - I've always used grub on single disk installations, but at the moment linux doesn't know the other disk exists...is this a probing thing somehow to find out the right details for GRUB and /etc/fstab? I'm seriously considering telling him to save an image of his whole XP disk onto an external drive, repartitioning the RAID to a normal unRAIDed partition and copying it back to normal - problem is I bet XP would fall over due to driver/hardware changes ...grrr
Thanks for your patience and thoughts,Chrisp.s. - feel free to tell me if I reach the end of what might be considered normal allowance for questions! ;)

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Date: Tue, 24 May 2011 12:00:02 +0000

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--Forwarded Message Attachment--
From: jmthelostpacket at googlemail.com
To: nottingham at mailman.lug.org.uk
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 13:51:05 +0100
Subject: Re: [Nottingham] Dual boot GRUB woes on RAID

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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--Forwarded Message Attachment--
From: martin at ml1.co.uk
To: nottingham at mailman.lug.org.uk
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 23:14:28 +0100
Subject: [Nottingham] WebP - Anyone heard of it or using it? Or seen it even?

Folks,

So... We've had gif superseded by png... Looks like there's a move to
usurp both png and jpg with a new Google-ism of WebP:

http://code.google.com/speed/webp/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/23/webp_format_in_chrome_gmail_picasa/

http://code.google.com/p/webp/

Patented to be 'open' and supposedly 40% better compression than jpg
for similar visual quality...

Too new to be seen anywhere yet? Good, bad, not needed, and/or is
Google big enough to push it through?

Interestingly, on http://code.google.com/speed/webp/ , the versions
for the various OSes are listed in the order Linux, Windows, Mac OS
X...

Ain't got it in my old version of GIMP!... One for the next distro update?

(BTW: GIMP next talk ;-) )

Cheers,
Martin

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