Bug#423022: Bug#422851: "grub-probe -t partmap" doesn't work with software RAID

[Jeroen Dekkers]

At Sat, 19 May 2007 15:13:58 +0100,
Sam Morris wrote:
> In addition, it would be nice if the 'out of disk' error could be
> deferred until grub actually tries to read a block that is out of range,
> as grub-legacy does 

The problem is that it actually tries to do that, because the RAID
superblock is located at the end of the partition.

> (even through it doesn't 'see' the RAID partition as
> such, I can still boot from it without complaint). 

That's probably because you have RAID1. The only difference between a
RAID and a non-RAID is that there is a RAID superblock at the end, you
can just mount a RAID1 partition as normal. This is how grub legacy
was always able to boot from RAID1 partitions. This won't work with
RAID0 or RAID5 however.

> I wonder if d-i warns the user that they may be creating an unbootable
> system if the partition that contains /boot does not exist wholly within
> the first 7.8 GiB/128 GiB/128 PiB (depending on the addressing mode in
> use) of the disk? :)

I think that 7.8GiB limit has been gone for a long time now, I don't
think there will be a lot of installations on such machines. My guess
is that the 128 GiB limit is still a problem.

Jeroen Dekkers