Grub freezes on promise ultra 100

[yonu]

ok simple question and I am hoping someone here can help me out I have a system I have had running for about the last couple years on FC5 I recently installed a new motherboard into the system and everything seems fine until I connect to HDD to the promise ultra controller to setup raid and it freezes on the screen with GRUB in the top left corner no cursor flashing no nothing if i move the cable back to the standard ide port on the MB it boots and runs fine

Thanks and Merry Christmas to you all,
yonu

[yonu]

any thoughts on this issue I have tryed resetting up grub but have had no luck

[yonu]

come on anyone have any ideas I am at my wits end with this problem

[mattywix]

could be you need to add a driver to the ramdisk to handle the raid.
Search to find if theres a particular driver for that raid (".ko" files), and if so check if its in your ramdisk you use to boot with - if not add it in.

Also I find lilo a bit more robust with raid - it doesnt seem to do the multiphase thing grub does.

[yonu]

ok i have never had to change the ramdisk so how do i goabout doing this

thanks,
yonu

[mattywix]

Im away on holiday in Spain, sat in front of an explorer browser on windows XP (not my choice). I cant just fire up a bash shell and look at the ramdisk and write you a how-to.
Best you google for it and if you dont succeed I´ll give you a hand when Im back on a less primitive operating system. When God created man He gave him arms hands and legs so he could be useful and do useful stuff. When Microsoft created windows they decided that just buttocks would suffice.

[yonu]

lol ok not a prob I will see what i can find out

[yonu]

on another not would the driver issue cause it not to boot before the os selection ever comes up as in the greezing at the GRUB screen?

[mattywix]

If I remember (and its a little hazy now), the first stage of grub will always work because it uses bios interrupts. Somewhere down the line the driver has to be loaded and thats from a ramdisk. Not sure what grub does in its second stage, but Ive used lilo in the past so I dont have to think about it much.
Is your grub configured to prompt or to rush straight through? Theres some keystroke that forces grub to popup the menu. If you get the menu you can manually go stage by stage and see where it bombs.
Sorry Im so vague, but I dont think about this every day.

[yonu]

no prob it is set to show a menu and it doesn't get to it it stops before it

[lmo]

There is that "drive order" thing that happens when you connect more drives.
How many drives, what type (PATA/SATA), and how are the cables connected?
Which one has the /boot partition and which one has the root /

[yonu]

they are IDE and there are 2 drives a master and a slave one have the system the other is blank as it is to be a mirror drive it works great on the regular ide controller however when i move it to the promise is when it locks up with GRUB inb the top left corner

[lmo]

Originally Posted by yonu

they are IDE and there are 2 drives a master and a slave one have the system the other is blank as it is to be a mirror drive it works great on the regular ide controller however when i move it to the promise is when it locks up with GRUB inb the top left corner

It sounds like it "breaks" your setup when the drive is disconnected from the regular ide controller. You probably have an lvm that depends on both drives being right where they are somehow. May be easier to get a new drive for the new controller. I'll bet it doesn't work with just 1 drive in the system? Either that, or it is flaky the way you are doing master/slave and then change it without getting the cables and jumpers right.

[bradchaus]

give some serious thought to using linux software raid ... it will be faster than the hardware raid, and not proprietary

[yonu]

actaully the system has been running on one drive upuntil i decided to setup the rqaid and i have had no luck getting the software raid working