bugGNU GRUB - Bugs: bug #40935, Raid Corruption Failed Boot...

 
 

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bug #40935: Raid Corruption Failed Boot normal.mod not found

Submitter:  Lee <numenory>
Submitted:  Tue 17 Dec 2013 11:44:18 AM UTC
   
 
Category:  Booting Severity:  Major
Priority:  5 - Normal Item Group:  None
Status:  None Privacy:  Public
Assigned to:  None Originator Name: 
Open/Closed:  Open Release:  other
Release:  Reproducibility:  None
Planned Release:  2.03+

Tue 17 Dec 2013 11:44:18 AM UTC, original submission:  

I have just encountered what I believe to be a strange bug involving grub2.

System bios based 2007 pc
Raid 10 - (not manaually constructed) All under / no seperate parttions other than swap.
Ubuntu 13.04 standard 3.8 kernel
Grub2 as included by distro

Events:

Did an apt-get dist-upgrade to install the vary latest kernel on 14/12/13 (not a full system upgrade)

Grub looked to update fine, and the system has had the kernel updated before.

Rebooted, Grub dropped to Rescue mode with the error "normal.mod not found"

Booted to http://www.sysresccd.org live cd

The raid array came up, and i mounted it.

Checked that /boot/grub/i386-pc/normal.mod existed, it did and i386-pc directory looked fine.

Chrooted the system, and tried most of the suggestions found around google involving re-installing grub or using apt to completely purge and then re-install, all of which completed without complaint.  After rebooting in each instance still the /boot/grub/i386-pc/normal.mod not found.

Then at the grub rescue prompt i did 'ls /boot/grub/i386-pc/' and instead of the list of files i saw (and subsequently re-saw) garbage or more accurately what looked to be the contents (about 1 lines worth) of a csv file containing data about books (one of these would have been on the system).  I re-booted to the live cd and double checked i386-pc looked perfect.  I ran an fsck -f on the array and also forced an mdadm check and then an mdadm resync, no complaints from any of the processes. Still no boot and same error.

At this point I used seagate seatools live cd to check each of the 250gb hard disks (wd2550ys) 5 in total.  The raid 10 array consisted of 4 live disks (2 near-copies) and 1 redundant spare.  One of the live disks had some sector errors.

I pulled the drive with the errors on it, replaced with a clean drive, booted once again to system rescue cd, let the degraded array sort itself out, added my clean disk in as a spare and rebooted.

No boot, but no error message, system appeared to look for the bootloader on the fresh disk.  Rebooted pressed esc and manually chose a different disk, system booted.  Installed grub to the fresh disk, system fine once more.

The only conclusion that I can draw is that linux reads a software raid array in a different manner to grub when there have been bad sectors, linux can still see the information correctly grub cannot.

Lee <numenory>

 

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  • -email is unavailable- added by phcoder (Updated the item)
  • -email is unavailable- added by numenory (Submitted the item)
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    Follow 2 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2017-03-05 phcoder Planned Release2.02 2.03+
    2016-03-02 phcoder Planned ReleaseNone 2.02

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