Installing and booting Debian from large hard drives in a RAID without GPT
Hi list,
I just purchased an HP ProLiant Micro Server G2020T. As for the hard drives, I installed 4 3TB Western Digital HDs. So far so good, but volumes with a capacity greater than 2TB require a GPT partition table. Unfortunately, the server does not support UEFI, and thus can't boot from GPT partitions natively.
So, when I ran the Debian installer, I used the following partitioning scheme on all drives since I wanted to combine them in a software RAID:
1MB BIOS Boot Partition (BBP) for GRUB
512MB dedicated /boot partition
partition with all the remaining disk space.
I then proceeded to setup software RAID:
no RAID on the 1MB BIOS boot partition (not sure if this is correct)
RAID1 for the 512MB /boot partition including all the HDs.
RAID5 for the large partition that remained for file storage.
I then set up the /boot partition (/dev/md0) to contain an EXT3 file system and also configured the mount point to be / boot.
For the large partition, I setup LVM and created logical volumes for the root and SWAP partition. I also configured those partitions accordingly so the installer would know how to use them.
Once I finished, the installation went through without any problems. After the system was installed, I used the 'Install the GRUB boot loader' option to install GRUB on all HDS (/dev/sda through /dev/sdd), which worked just fine.
However, when I rebooted the system I got an error message saying the root file system could not be mounted. I suspected the LVM to cause issues, so I re-installed everything but this time without LVM. Unfortunately, the same issue persists… Has anyone here ever been in a similar situation and could suggest a fix? I have a feeling I may be missing something important, but just can't find the right path to take…
Thanks a lot for any help / ideas!
Robin
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