grub cannot be installed on intel 82801 raid controller

[Ákos Maróy]

after installing 9.10 amd64 on an HP Envy 15 laptop, the grub setup phase at the end of the install fails. the only way to boot the system is via the super grub bootable USB - which, while inconvenient, does the work fine.

the setup uses an intel 82801 RAID controller:

00:1f.2 RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 82801 SATA RAID Controller (rev 05)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 1522
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 33
        I/O ports at 5048 [size=8]
        I/O ports at 5054 [size=4]
        I/O ports at 5040 [size=8]
        I/O ports at 5050 [size=4]
        I/O ports at 5020 [size=32]
        Memory at d4205000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K]
        Capabilities: [80] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable+
        Capabilities: [70] Power Management version 3
        Capabilities: [a8] SATA HBA <?>
        Capabilities: [b0] PCIe advanced features <?>
        Kernel driver in use: ahci

and the devices are under /dev/mapper:

$ ls /dev/mapper/ | more
control
isw_cdfcbdcfed_RAID-0
isw_cdfcbdcfed_RAID-01
isw_cdfcbdcfed_RAID-02
isw_cdfcbdcfed_RAID-04

where RAID-0 is the raw device, the others are the partitions. the original drives coincidentally also appear as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.

the original install left grub quite unconfigured, no /etc/default/grub file, no /boot/grub/grub.cfg either. manual trials from the install disk to install grub via grup-install fail, it missing the above raid IDs, particularly the device ID (RAID-0) and the id for the root partition (RAID-02). adding these into device.map makes the grub-install run through, but the system still wouldn't boot

having booted into the installed system via the grub super boot disk, and having updated all packages, update-grub brings the following, depending on the contents of the device map:

# cat /boot/grub/device.map
(hd0) /dev/sda
# update-grub
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-19-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-19-generic
grub-probe: error: no mapping exists for `isw_cdfcbdcfed_RAID-02'
grub-probe: error: no mapping exists for `isw_cdfcbdcfed_RAID-02'
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-14-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-14-generic
grub-probe: error: no mapping exists for `isw_cdfcbdcfed_RAID-02'
grub-probe: error: no mapping exists for `isw_cdfcbdcfed_RAID-02'
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
done

if I put the RAID-XX ids into the device map, it goes through:

# cat /boot/grub/device.map
(hd0) /dev/mapper/isw_cdfcbdcfed_RAID-0
(isw_cdfcbdcfed_RAID-0) /dev/mapper/isw_cdfcbdcfed_RAID-0
(isw_cdfcbdcfed_RAID-02) /dev/mapper/isw_cdfcbdcfed_RAID-02
# update-grub
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-19-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-19-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-14-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-14-generic
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
done

but when booting, I get dropped into a grub rescue shell, with a message saying that the drive doesnt exist. (indeed, it is referring to the /dev/mapper/...RAID-02 entity, and probably is not finding it)

I wonder how this can be made to work..