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

[Sam Morris]

On Mon, 2007-05-21 at 13:08 +0200, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
> 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.

Oh, good point. My only remaining point of confusion is how I am able to
access the (md0) device fine from within grub, since it can't read the
superblocks. Does it just assume that any pc partitions of type 0xfd
with unreadable superblocks are part of a RAID 1 array, or is it
possible that something else is going on?

My array is made up of partitions on two disks; the first is the primary
master on the motherboard's ATA controller, and the second is on a
Promise PCI card.

Now, AFAIK the promise card cannot do 48-bit LBA addressing without a
bios flash that I never applied. But is it possible that my
motherboard's controller is able to do 48-bit addressing?

If this were the case it would explain how grub is able to access an
(md0) device (via the fully-readable (hd0,2) device), and also where the
'out of disk' error comes from (from trying to read the superblock of
(hd3,2)).

If this is the case, it would be nice if the raid module would only
throw a warning if some of the component devices could not be added to a
RAID1 array.

-- 
Sam Morris
http://robots.org.uk/

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