problem with RAID and LBA addressing

[Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com>]

Forwarding to upstream.  Anyone knows why Sam's mails aren't echoed in the
list, despite grub-devel@gnu.org is in CC ?

On Sat, May 19, 2007 at 03:13:58PM +0100, Sam Morris wrote:
> clone 423022 -1
> retitle -1 Errors that cause the user to enter rescue mode are not displayed
> thanks
> 
> On Sat, 2007-05-19 at 14:10 +0100, Sam Morris wrote:
> > 'grub-mkimage --output=/boot/grub/core.img ext2 pc raid _chain' dumps me
> > to the rescue console.
> > 
> > I wonder if I am hitting the rescue console because of the "out of disk"
> > error that I see when inserting the 'raid' module by hand? The
> > partitions in my raid array are 300 GiB, which is larger than the 128
> > GiB limit imposed by LBA-28 addressing.
> 
> I patched kern/disk.c to return GRUB_ERR_NONE instead of throwing the
> 'out of disk' error and, now I can boot up perfectly! So it appears this
> is indeed the problem.
> 
> > If this is the case then I guess the error is really my fault and I
> > should fix it by creating a separate partition at the start of the disk
> > for /boot. However, the code that brings me to the rescue console
> > doesn't actually print any errors, it just dumps me there, so I may just
> > be barking up the wrong tree. :)
> 
> Ideally grub would display the the error message that causes the user to
> be thrown into the rescue console.
> 
> In addition, it would be nice if the 'out of disk' error could be
> deferred until grub actually tries to read a block that is out of range,
> as grub-legacy does (even through it doesn't 'see' the RAID partition as
> such, I can still boot from it without complaint). But this is less
> important, as I should really have a working system to begin with. I
> won't clone a separate bug for this unless you think it's worthwhile.
> 
> I wonder if d-i warns the user that they may be creating an unbootable
> system if the partition that contains /boot does not exist wholly within
> the first 7.8 GiB/128 GiB/128 PiB (depending on the addressing mode in
> use) of the disk? :)
> 
> -- 
> Sam Morris
> http://robots.org.uk/
> 
> PGP key id 1024D/5EA01078
> 3412 EA18 1277 354B 991B  C869 B219 7FDB 5EA0 1078

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Robert Millan

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