Grub2 and booting multiple drives??

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Looking for some input on this, I did some searching and found some things referencing it but no fixes…

Here is what i got.

sda (which holds openSuse 12.3) is 600G and runs fine.
sdb (holds win 7 for gaming) is 80G

What Im trying to accomplish is adding the win 7 to Grub2. Currently I can only boot openSuse which is not a problem as long as I dont want to play D3.

I’m sure its something simple and im just not educated enough to know it.

What info do I need to supply here so someone can help me out so I don’t blow out both installs trying to manipulate Grub2.:slight_smile:

2

When you run the command “os-prober” (as root), does it find Win7 - i.e. does it mention Windows 7 in the output?

3

Here is the output of os-prober:

os-prober

ERROR: ddf1: wrong # of devices in RAID set “ddf1_nas1” [1/3] on /dev/sda
No volume groups found

Well… This I’m assuming is a bad sign?.?.?:\

4

Run YaST->System->Boot Loader and click on Boot Loader Options.
Then activate the option “Probe Foreign OS” and click OK. Windows should then appear in the boot menu.

5

Yes, it is. That’s why the Windows entry was not being automatically added to the grub2 menu.

I’m not a RAID expert, so I’ll hope somebody else notices this thread and can provide assistance.

6

It does not sound like this is a RAID set up so maybe you need to turn RAID off in the BIOS.

Is this an HP machine it seems that they are bad about turning on FAKE RAID by default even if not needed.

7

The disk was probably part of RAID in the past. Could you run os-prober again and upload /var/log/messages to SUSE Paste (it will be long)? Just to see how far it could go?

8

@gogalthorp That paticular hard drive may have come out of a HP machine. Hard telling tho I just pulled it out of a pile.lol!

Yeah I will give it a shot when I get home… Should be around 6 EST

Thank you all for your help…

9

Ok once again here is the output of os-prober:

os-prober
ERROR: ddf1: wrong # of devices in RAID set “ddf1_nas1” [1/3] on /dev/sda
No volume groups found

Having issues with Susepaste… Apparently I am a spammer!!!

10

ok show

fdisk -l

Put out between code tags (the # in the menu)

I still think the BIOS may have RAID turned on did you check that?

11

Here is the output of fdisk:

disk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 640.1 GB, 640135028736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77825 cylinders, total 1250263728 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xa728f489


   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1            2048     4208639     2103296   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2   *     4208640    46153727    20972544   83  Linux
/dev/sda3        46153728  1250263039   602054656   83  Linux


Disk /dev/sdb: 80.0 GB, 80000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9726 cylinders, total 156250000 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000dbc37


   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            2048   156246015    78121984    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

and I did check the BIOS only to find that the drives are NOT in raid…

Hope that output tells you something

Thanks again for your help

12

fidisk looks ok

OK if the drive was RAIDed then there may be meta data on it somewhere that says this and confusing the software.

Only thing I know to do is to wipe the entire disk with a dd command since I don’t know where that metadata is set. But you would need to reinstall. Also it is unclear which disk so both need to be wiped if you don’t know their history.

Maybe some else has a better idea.

13

Try adding to “/etc/grub.d/40_custom”


menuentry "Windows on /dev/sdb1"  {
      set root=(hd1,1)
      chainloader +1
}

and then run:


# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
14

Thank you for the suggestion…

I made the changes to /etc/grub.d/40_custom in kwrite and ran it in Konsole (root) here is the output:

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfgGenerating grub.cfg ...
Found theme: /boot/grub2/themes/openSUSE/theme.txt
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.7.10-1.11-desktop
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd-3.7.10-1.11-desktop
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.7.10-1.4-desktop
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd-3.7.10-1.4-desktop
ERROR: ddf1: wrong # of devices in RAID set "ddf1_nas1" [1/3] on /dev/sda
  No volume groups found
done
15

Did it generate a usable “grub.cfg” in spite of the error?

You can change this line


GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false

in “/etc/default/grub” so that it doesn’t run os-prober in future.

16

The message comes from dmraid that is called by os-prober. The message is entirely cosmetic - if dmraid fails, os-prober simply assumes there is no dmraid devices, and you do not have any.

The question remains why os-prober does not detect existing Windows installation. It may be a bug is os-prober. To debug it further I need logs from os-prober invocation. Logs are written in /var/log/messages.

DDF has “anchor block” - it is the very last block of device. It should be enough to clear it. But as I said already this should not change anything w.r.t. Windows detection.

17

Bit it is erroring out before it gets to sdb where Windows lives

18

I have not seen a single log line to make any statement about whether or not it errored out nor if it errored out because of this error if it did.

19

So I tried to Susepaste the /va/log/messages and I turned into a spammer. I will try it again and post when I get home.

Thanks a bunch for helping…

20

/var/log/messages could be long and I need only os-prober related. So I’d suggest

  • in one terminal window run “tail -f /var/log/messages”
  • in another terminal window run “os-prober”
  • post everything that will be output in the first window. If it is not very long, you could even post output here.