Ubuntu 12.04 can't boot after installing with software RAID 1

Posted by Bill on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Bill
Published on 2012-06-15T20:53:39Z Indexed on 2012/06/15 21:18 UTC
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I've been trying to install Ubuntu with software RAID on my server and there is obviously something that I don't understand about the process.

This is the guide that I followed: https://help.ubuntu.com/11.04/serverguide/advanced-installation.html

I have two identical 1 TB disks in my server. I went through the initial install process and manually set up my partitions. On each disk I set up:

  • (1) 100 MB partition for EFI boot (I didn't originally have this but added it based on a forum post I found after my original install failed to boot, I ended up with EFIboot since that was what the 'guided partitioning' decided to do)
  • (1) 970 MB partition for /
  • (1) 30 MB partition for swap

I then created new RAID 1 disks combining the two partitions, one from each disk, such that each partition is mirrored. I then configured their usage as stated above. After saving the configuration I said yes to boot in a degraded state.

The rest of the setup went normally, no errors of any kind. I saw GRUB being installed and again no errors. However, after rebooting the server I get the dreaded 'Insert boot media' and nothing happens.

I loaded up the recovery disk and the mdadm configuration looks correct.

  • md0 is my EFIBoot partition
  • md1 is my \ partition using ext4
  • md2 is my swap partition

Running file -s /dev/md0 doesn't indicate that GRUB is there and so I attempted to reinstall GRUB using the recovery disk. I selected the md0 disk and it appeared to install just fine.

Running file -s /dev/md1 shows the error needs journal recovery, I'm not sure if that's related or not or how to fix that.

Rebooting gives me the same problem, no boot media found. I've searched around the internet but can't figure out what to do next or more importantly how to troubleshoot what exactly is going wrong.

Thanks!

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