Jason's Blog

After spending several days of pain and frustration over trying to get RAID 1 working with Lucid Lynx and GPT, I finally got it working. Maybe this will be of use to someone else.

I initially tried following steps from here, but was unable to get the system to boot correctly. Eventually I stumbled upon this article which allowed me to get the boot loader working correctly.

Apparently between MSDOS partition tables and GPT, MSDOS automatically reserves a portion of the hard drive for the boot loader while GPT doesn’t. I guess the advantage of having GPT do so is that you can place it anywhere on the disc, although I would imagine you would want it near the beginning anyway.

You can follow either the graphical installation shown here or use the alternate cd to install 10.04, but the most important thing is that you leave a very small partition (bios_grub in order for the boot loader to handle things correctly. You can do this directly from gparted or run it on the command line like so:

$ sudo parted /dev/sda set bios_grub on

I haven’t tried configuring RAID 1 on the bios_grub partitions for each HDD, but I’m happy to leave it be as it works. Once that’s done, you can install grub manually (where sda and sdb are your respective hard disks):

$ sudo update-grub
$ sudo grub-install /dev/sda
$ sudo grub-install /dev/sdb

Additional Resources:

• http://blog.denisiuk.org/2010/06/raid-ubuntu-1004-linux.html
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347650

So as par my last post, I’ve been working on an old machine to install Linux on. I was having some problems with the computer. I didn’t know if the hard drive was bad, the IDE cables were kaput, or the motherboard was shot. But thanks to Dana’s parents, I got some old PC part’s to check out! Upon trying out the new hard drive(s) I got the following error:

Keyboard Error: No Keyboard Present.
Press F1 to continue.

Oh gee, that sure is helpful! I wonder who came up with that? Unfortunately, the one floppy disc I had available somehow got corrupted so I won’t be able to flash the bios until I get another one. If that fails, I guess I’ll have to see if I can get a new motherboard. So if anyone would like to donate an AMD Socket A, ATX motherboard that supports SDRAM (PC100 or PC133) to my cause, I would be very happy!

In other PC related news, my new DVD-RW drive came in today. It’s pretty sweet. It supports DVD -R, +R, RW, Dual Layer along with CD-RW as well. I can burn a full 4.7GB DVD-R in only about 5 minutes! Time to finally clean up all the junk that has been piling up on my hard drive…

So I’ve gone where I’ve never gone before. I’m finally about to use another operating system other than Microsoft’s Windows. I had an old PC in my closet that was just sitting there collecting dust, so I came up with the decision to install Linux (Open SuSE distribution) on it. I’m not sure exactly how I feel about it yet, but I think it will be a rather interesting experiment to see how everything goes. Doesn’t this look like the coolest logo ever?The SuSE distribution is a massive 3.5GB download, but thanks to bit torrent it was a rather quick operation that only took about 3 hours to download. Pretty nice eh? I’ll be working on installing that over the next few days, so I’ll let you know how it goes and I’ll probably even post a few screenshots of the operation too.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I’ve finally been admitted to UAB. Woohoo! (Yes, I’m still going to Samford… it’s just a real complicated issue, I just have to take one class fall/spring at UAB this next year in order to graduate)