1.5 terabyte drives fail to boot

[Martin]

Binary package hint: grub2

I am running a typical RAID1 setup; it is as follows:

(md0) /boot is the first partition - it is RAID'ed but no LVM
(md1) /root is next, RAID'ed, no LVM
(md2) is a physical volume for LVM, and everything else lives there except swap
(md3) is swap, and it lives at the end of the drives.

When I am using 1T drives, I have no problems. I can plug in a blank 1.5T drive, partition it, and add it to the RAID. However, when I try to boot from the 1.5T drive, the system hangs right after the BIOS splash screen. No GRUB messages are displayed at all. This happens on two different motherboards (ASRock and Gigabyte).

I am a software developer and am happy to help work on this if someone can point me in the right direction.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Nov 5 17:40:27 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Package: grub-pc 1.97~beta4-1ubuntu3
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
SourcePackage: grub2
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic x86_64
XsessionErrors:
 (gnome-settings-daemon:2361): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
 (gnome-settings-daemon:2361): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
 (polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:2579): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion `initialization_value != 0' failed
 (nautilus:2540): Eel-CRITICAL **: eel_preferences_get_boolean: assertion `preferences_is_initialized ()' failed

[Felix Zielcke (fzielcke)]

Am Freitag, den 06.11.2009, 01:58 +0000 schrieb Martin:
> I am running a typical RAID1 setup; it is as follows:
>
> (md0) /boot is the first partition - it is RAID'ed but no LVM
> (md1) /root is next, RAID'ed, no LVM
> (md2) is a physical volume for LVM, and everything else lives there
> except swap
> (md3) is swap, and it lives at the end of the drives.
>
> When I am using 1T drives, I have no problems. I can plug in a blank
> 1.5T drive, partition it, and add it to the RAID. However, when I try
> to boot from the 1.5T drive, the system hangs right after the BIOS
> splash screen. No GRUB messages are displayed at all. This happens
> on
> two different motherboards (ASRock and Gigabyte).
>
> I am a software developer and am happy to help work on this if someone
> can point me in the right direction.

If there's not even the initial GRUB displayed, then either the BIOS has
a problem with that disk size and doestn't load MBR at all or the stage1
code in MBR has a bug with that BIOS.
But strange that this happens with 2 different motherboards.
Did both have the newest BIOS? And are these 2 not that old?

Maybe you could try with GRUB Legacy. If it at least displays GRUB.
For some people the GRUB Legacy BIOS code seems to work better.
Or *shrug* LILO.

--
Felix Zielcke
Proud Debian Maintainer and GNU GRUB developer

[Martin (stiaszny)]

yeah, my first instinct was "BIOS problem", which was why I got the second
motherboard.
The ASRock was purchased in June, and the Gigabyte one was purchased on
Monday. I also
noted that this happed with Ubuntu 9.04 server (on the ASRock), which I
believe was still using
GRUB Legacy.

Can you point me in the direction of some quality information on how the
early stages of BIOS/booting/MBR work? I'd like to create the minimal
"hello world" case that will replicate the problem so I can isolate it.

For the record, the cfdisk that was shipped with 9.04 couldn't read the
partitioned 1.5T drive, because
a 32-bit integer had overflowed. I wonder if a similar problem exists in
the BIOSes.

- martin

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 2:38 AM, Felix Zielcke <email address hidden> wrote:

> Am Freitag, den 06.11.2009, 01:58 +0000 schrieb Martin:
> > I am running a typical RAID1 setup; it is as follows:
> >
> > (md0) /boot is the first partition - it is RAID'ed but no LVM
> > (md1) /root is next, RAID'ed, no LVM
> > (md2) is a physical volume for LVM, and everything else lives there
> > except swap
> > (md3) is swap, and it lives at the end of the drives.
> >
> > When I am using 1T drives, I have no problems. I can plug in a blank
> > 1.5T drive, partition it, and add it to the RAID. However, when I try
> > to boot from the 1.5T drive, the system hangs right after the BIOS
> > splash screen. No GRUB messages are displayed at all. This happens
> > on
> > two different motherboards (ASRock and Gigabyte).
> >
> > I am a software developer and am happy to help work on this if someone
> > can point me in the right direction.
>
> If there's not even the initial GRUB displayed, then either the BIOS has
> a problem with that disk size and doestn't load MBR at all or the stage1
> code in MBR has a bug with that BIOS.
> But strange that this happens with 2 different motherboards.
> Did both have the newest BIOS? And are these 2 not that old?
>
> Maybe you could try with GRUB Legacy. If it at least displays GRUB.
> For some people the GRUB Legacy BIOS code seems to work better.
> Or *shrug* LILO.
>
>
> --
> Felix Zielcke
> Proud Debian Maintainer and GNU GRUB developer
>
> --
> 1.5 terabyte drives fail to boot
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/476066
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>
> Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu: New
>
> Bug description:
> Binary package hint: grub2
>
> I am running a typical RAID1 setup; it is as follows:
>
> (md0) /boot is the first partition - it is RAID'ed but no LVM
> (md1) /root is next, RAID'ed, no LVM
> (md2) is a physical volume for LVM, and everything else lives there except
> swap
> (md3) is swap, and it lives at the end of the drives.
>
> When I am using 1T drives, I have no problems. I can plug in a blank 1.5T
> drive, partition it, and add it to the RAID. However, when I try to boot
> from the 1.5T drive, the system hangs right after the BIOS splash screen.
> No GRUB messages are displayed at all. This happens on two different
> motherboards (ASRock and Gigabyte).
>
> I am a software developer and am happy to help work on this if someone can
> point me in the right direction....

[Felix Zielcke (fzielcke)]

Am Freitag, den 06.11.2009, 18:10 +0000 schrieb Martin:
>
> yeah, my first instinct was "BIOS problem", which was why I got the second
> motherboard.
> The ASRock was purchased in June, and the Gigabyte one was purchased on
> Monday. I also
> noted that this happed with Ubuntu 9.04 server (on the ASRock), which I
> believe was still using
> GRUB Legacy.

Urgs so both mainboard were bought this year?
Then they shouldn't have a problem with 1,5 TB.

> Can you point me in the direction of some quality information on how the
> early stages of BIOS/booting/MBR work? I'd like to create the minimal
> "hello world" case that will replicate the problem so I can isolate it.

Sorry I'm not familiar with asm. I can only tell you that the GRUB 2 MBR
code is in boot/i386/pc/boot.S
But the code has comments.

--
Felix Zielcke
Proud Debian Maintainer and GNU GRUB developer

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

Can you run the bootinfo script and give details on the raid configuration and how you installed grub?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for grub2 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]