Ubuntu
grub package

Using Intel Bios RAID grub error 2

Asked by Walt Corey

Hi,
    I've been wrestling with this problem for some time, in the beta of 8.04 as well as GA.

I recently purchased a Dell XPS 720 with two 250GB SATA drives. This was preconfigured with Vista. After blowing away Vista I tried to load U7.10 (64) which wouldn't even boot. I ultimately installed Fedora 8 (64) which booted, installed, and ran .... well it ran like Fedora. This was during the Alpha testing of 8.04. Since Fedora has always required more love and attention then I wanted to give an OS I installed U8.04 (64) when it went beta. I installed from the alternate disk and muddled my way through which drive I wanted to install on. Fedora didn't ask me that, it just installed, spanned both volumes and presented me with 465+GB between the two volumes. I would really like to use 8.04 though so I went though the install process. However, when I booted after the install I could only get Grub error 2. Eventually I disabled RAID on both volumes in the BIOS and I could then boot 8.04 beta.

I've done a lot of research on this and essentially it seems the general answer is effectively, "don't use it, use dmraid instead". Dmraid appears to require a lot of configuration through 8.04 and while it may be that dmraid is better, faster, later, greater, or...it may be that that the bios version is better. What's more is Windows and other Linux distros, my first hand experience is with Fedora, and I heard OpenSuse, honor the bios setting.

So my question is really a two-parter.

Could someone explain why Ubuntu doesn't / can't honor the bios raid, while others can and, either

When it will ,
How to get it to, or
If and why it never will.

As I said earlier, I would prefer to stay with Ubuntu, I think it's more stable than Fedora for those whose hobby doesn't include the care and feeding of a Linux distro.

Thanks,

Walt

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Martin Kalén (martin-kalen) said : 		#1

Did you try to re-install and use LVM when selecting the disk partitioning options? A GRUB error 2 was resolved for me when switching to (non-encrypted) LVM. See my answer at https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/26388 for details.

In the past I have also been able to resolve a GRUB error 2 by going from LBA to CHS mode (which for me is counter intuitive) in BIOS.

I cannot explain why LVM gives GRUB a different view of the disks. No BIOS option changes, device mappings in GRUB or similar was made here. The time i was tinkering with BIOS was on an older Ubuntu distro without the LVM option in the installer (so it might have helped also on that hardware with LBA in BIOS).

But again; it might be worth a shot for you to try LVM. Good luck!

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