Tag: grub2
Why I hate lilo
by BenV on Jan.11, 2011, under Software
Every time I install a machine with the latest Slackware, I’m amazed again at the installed boot manager – lilo.
Sure, lilo works. Most of the times. Even when you have a raid-1 boot device.
Unless you don’t have the latest version of lilo of course.
Today I tried to continue a Slackware64 (current) install of a machine that I installed a week ago.
It worked fine, was just about to install Xen when one of the disks started acting up.
Obviously SMART didn’t help for a bit
* Report – No errors!
* Short Self test – Your disk is fine!
* You want a long test that takes 4 hours? Your machine locks up before it completes, haha!
But when the disk kept failing every time when the md1 resync hit 36%, I yanked out the disk and sent it RMA.
Dmesg showed error like this:
[ 3362.784132] ata1.00: failed command: READ DMA EXT
[ 3362.784135] ata1.00: cmd 25/00:00:3f:60:f4/00:04:57:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 524288 in
[ 3362.784135] res 40/00:00:02:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
[ 3362.784136] ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
[ 3362.784139] ata1: hard resetting link
[ 3364.002049] ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
[ 3364.009142] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/33
[ 3364.009148] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=0x00 driverbyte=0x08
[ 3364.009150] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Sense Key : 0xb [current] [descriptor]
[ 3364.009152] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex):
[ 3364.009153] 72 0b 00 00 00 00 00 0c 00 0a 80 00 00 00 00 00
[ 3364.009156] 00 00 00 01
[ 3364.009158] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] ASC=0x0 ASCQ=0x0
[ 3364.009159] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: cdb[0]=0x28: 28 00 57 f4 60 3f 00 04 00 00
[ 3364.009162] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 1475633215
[ 3364.009174] ata1: EH complete
So today I figured I could continue installing with only half a raid-1 array.
But it didn’t boot (“Loading operating system…. *halt*).
I figured lilo must have been installed to the MBR of the disk that I yanked, so I booted from LAN and ran lilo.
Obviously lilo complained, because /dev/sda was only half the raid-1 array and disks were missing!
Fine. I changed my boot device to /dev/md0, hoping that lilo would get the hint.
Warning: LBA32 addressing assumed
Fatal: Not all RAID-1 disks are active; use '-H' to install to active disks only
# lilo -H
Warning: LBA32 addressing assumed
Warning: Partial RAID-1 install on active disks only: booting is not failsafe
Warning: Faulty disk in RAID-1 array; boot with caution!!
Fatal: Unusual RAID bios device code: 0xFF
*sigh*
This is why I hate lilo. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.
And it never tells you why. Or maybe it does, just like windows always tells you what’s wrong when you get a blue screen.
It’s probably this bug, but I don’t care. Always something.
Time to find the sources to grub.
Useful tools
by BenV on Jul.27, 2009, under Boring
Lotjuh was messing around with grub2 and its config…. fun!
Anyway, a nice tool to figure out uuids of block devices: blkid. (gives a nice overview per block device… you probably need to be root for it to work though)
Alternative: findfs, so you can search for a label or uuid.
Let is be known that grub2 is a kutproduct as far as documentation is concerned… but that’s no surprise given it’s infancy status 
Works pretty good so far though, once you get the grub.cfg etc right. Also works with my ext4 partition these days (required a svn up and recompile/reinstall though)
