Suse 10.3 Software Raid And Managled Boot After Install.

Hi Guys,

After a recent DMRAID (bios) failure (both disks, don't buy seagate!) I've had to rebuild the server from scrath. The previous install was an upgrade from 10.2 to 10.3 and everything worked fine.

This time i've come to install 10.3 from scartch and i've found a god awful problem with the install and I'm hoping someone can help.


I decided to swap back to using linux software raid as i've had a better experince in recovering a busted install.

I have 3 drives in the machine.

1 ide & 2 SATA.

the ide is primary master and contains /boot and swap.
the 2 sata drives make up the software raid.

the install runs fine up to the grub install which fails, i did some googling and it said this was a known issue. So I skipped this problem and let the install finish and go for the first boot.

Obvious grub fails so I edited the boot options to be (hd0,0) so it would actually begin booting.

The O/S begins to boot and then it complains it can't find /boot in fstab....

I looked at FSTAB and it had written some bizzare location for what if im right should have been /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2

I did a fdisk -l just to check and low and behold i believes the drive containing on boot and swap are on

/dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 respectively

i changed /etc/fstab to reflect this, but when i did an ls on /dev/sda* all i could find was /dev/sda there was no refence to the /dev/sda1 or /dev/sda2. I tried to do a mknod to create them and try to mount either of the partitions but i get told that they are invalid devices.

This is really annoying me and i can't seem to figure out what the hells happened.

Any help would be appriciated.

I hope you can get back to what you had originaly because I am afraid you messed things up badly now.

I looked at FSTAB and it had written some bizzare location for what if im right should have been /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2[/b]

I do not think they ar bizzare, but even when they are you better tell us what they are so we can decide for ourselves. They most likely are the way 10.3 uses udev to identify disks by there id (so that even when you change their position inside the system they can be identified).

Start from the original things and post /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst. Maybe this gives a clue.