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Hi all,
First Arch install, although I've been using Slackware for 12 years or so and Gentoo for 3 or so, and *nix for 30 or so.
Anyway, this is my first Arch install. I have a somewhat convoluted file layout using RAID, and this is only my second RAID install, so I'm guessing something is h0rk3d up with that. Although i'm not booting off a RAID volume, /dev/sda1 is a plain ordinary partition. I'm using the latest x86_64 iso.
Symptom: On reboot, just a blinking cursor. Grub can't even seem to get far enough to give me any kind of a message.
Relevant parts of /etc/fstab (can't cut and paste, hopefully no typos):
/dev/sda2 / ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda1 /boot ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/sdb1 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/md0 /home ext3 defatuls 0 1
<other devices not shown>Where /dev/md0 is /sdb2+sdc2+sdd2 in raid5.
mkinitcpio.conf HOOKS="base udev autodetect pata scsi sata raid mdadm filesystems"
Grub menu.lst:
title Arch Linux
root (nd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/45... ro
initrd /kernel26.imgYes, sda1 is marked bootable. The iso boots and runs just fine, so I think somehow I haven't gotten grub installed into the MBR very happily.
TIA,
dave
Last edited by dbc (2009-07-20 03:42:50)
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OK, solved. Wasn't a Grub issue at all. BIOS boot order got scrambled.
The mobo is an Asus P6T Workstation Pro, and this is my first system build with any of the P6T family. Just prior to installing Arch, I was doing some quick experiments with the Chakra LiveUSB. It turns out that on this mobo, in order to boot from a USB stick, you a) have to have it plugged in when you boot to BIOS, and b) select the USB stick as a *hard* *drive*, and c) make it the first hard drive in the boot order. Then you can boot to the USB stick. So.... I had my BIOS configured with boot order of 1. CD-ROM, 2. Hard-disk == USB, 3. Hard-disk == sata1.
Now, what you you expect to happen if you removed the USB stick and booted with no CD-ROM and no USB stick? Would you expect the BIOS to grab some other random SATA drive and make it first in the hard drive boot order? Me neither. Maybe if the other drives were explicitly mentioned in the boot order everything would shuffle up in order, but in any case it seems strange that some unmentioned drive gets arbitrarily grabbed as the boot volume.
After a little googling I've concluded that for any of the P6T family motherboards, booting from a USB stick is usually going to require two trips to the BIOS config menus -- once to enable the USB stick, and again to put your system back the way it was. This seems..... dim. (FWIW, otherwise so far I like the mobo a lot, although I haven't gotten a lot of mileage on it yet, obviously.)
-dave
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