A farewell to LILO (One bootloader to rule them all, part 2)

As mentioned previously, I set up a bunch of disks in a mixed RAID configuration on my new P5B Deluxe system, and merrily went on installing OS after OS.

The point of this exercise was to have my main OS (probably Vista 32) as well as a near half-a-terabyte partition set in RAID 0 mode, for speed, while some other stuff, for which disk performance is not that critical (OS-X, XP, Linux, more space), would reside quietly on a 3rd non raid disk. And while I'm at it, I would also setup a RAID 1 partition, as the Intel ICH8R "controller" of the P5B is now nice enough to allow you to create both a RAID0 and RAID1 drive out of the same 2 disks RAID array.

Which leaves us with the obvious problem of booting that lot, a capital problem indeed ( especially now that Vista is being such an ass about its boot loader). As an aside, I would like to point out that this is what happens when a company has a near monopoly with regards to installed OS base: They will obviously do their darnedest to prevent ANY other OS from eating even the smallest part of their market share. And I could comment on OS-X too. What is wrong with a standard partition scheme that you will recognize once you get your hand forced anyway (but not any sooner)? Why are you not happy with a big fat bootable primary partition with af type setup for you with Linux's fdisk?
And much much worse, how comes the partitions OS-X creates end up on the exact same block as the start of the next partition (have a look at your fdisk results in Linux - What the hell?)? I might talk about that later on, because this headache resulted in recently losing both a fresh install of XP along with a data partition and, what's worse, my Linux system. As the old proverb go, "Install XP, lose your data"...

So, considering that I have now done this operation twice, let me give you the long awaited heads up on the one bootloader to rule them all...


Accessing the ICH RAID disks under Linux

o Compile kernel with device mapper
o Pick up the latest devmapper package from ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/dm/
o Pick and compile dmraid
o dmraid -ay (if dmraid complains about missing kernel options, add them!)
o dmraid -s (Yay!) or ls /dev/mapper

And while you're at it, you can add something similar to this at the end of your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file (Slackware)

echo mounting RAID Volumes
dmraid -ay
mount -v -t ntfs /dev/mapper/isw_fhbagdjeh_Twix1 /mnt/vista32
mount -v -t ntfs /dev/mapper/isw_fhbagdjeh_Twix2 /mnt/vista64
mount -v -t ntfs /dev/mapper/isw_fhbagdjeh_Twix3 /mnt/strider
mount -v -t ntfs /dev/mapper/isw_fhbagdjeh_Secure1 /mnt/secure

Becomes simple enough... when you've done that twice.


So long LILO, and thanks for all the flawless boots...

One word if you stubbornly try to get LILO to boot one of the RAID0 partition as I did: Agh!!!

Fatal: Sorry, don't know how to handle device 0xfd02 => compile with latest source, as it will compile with devmapper (device-mapper or LVM2) if library is present. Look for -DDEVMAPPER when compiling.
OK then, added devmapper option, make all, make install and...
"Fatal : device mapper : only linear boot device supported"

Enought with this. I'm sure the LILO devs will add it some day, but for now grub it is then.


Pub grub?

GNU's versions: WTF? Pick up 1.95 and... configure: error: LZO library version 1.02 or later is required
OK then, http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/download/ to eventually realize: You should NOT grub 1.95. It's really grub 2.0 and too spanking new to be of any use. Instead, pick up grub 0.97 and live happily ever after!

Now, some of you might see some mention of a grub 0.97 dmraid patch, but because I'm actually using the 3rd non RAID disk (actually 1st one on my system) to install the bootloader, as well as ultimately boot, patching grub is unnecessary. I guess it would be necessary if we were to use our RAID0 as the boot disk. I'll have to try RAID5 one day, just for kicks :D

So, without further adieu to LILO, and with thanks to the Gentoo users:

grub --device-map=/dev/null
# My actual non-RAID boot disk
grub> device (hd0) /dev/sda
# The RAID0 array where the Vista's reside
grub> device (hd1) /dev/mapper/isw_fhbagdjeh_Twix
# Let's first add Linux, so that we can then edit the menu.lst
# My Linux is on /dev/sda4, hence hd0,3 with zero based indexes
grub> root (hd0,3)
Filesystem type is xfs, partition type 0x83
grub> setup (hd0,3)
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/xfs_stage1_5" exists... yes
Running "embed /boot/grub/xfs_stage1_5 (hd0,3)"... failed (this is not fatal)
Running "embed /boot/grub/xfs_stage1_5 (hd0,3)"... failed (this is not fatal)
Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0,3) /boot/grub/stage2 p /boot/grub/menu
.lst "... succeeded
Done.
grub> quit

At this stage, you wanna check your /boot/grub/device.map file. If you don't see the /dev/mapper entry for (hd1) as expected, you will have to add it manually.

From then on, you can go on creating your /boot/grub/menu.lst, which might eventually look something like this:

default 2
timeout 3

title  Slackware Linux 11.0
kernel (hd0,3)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda4

title  Slackware Linux 11.0 (Rescue)
kernel (hd0,3)/boot/vmlinuz.rescue root=/dev/sda4

title  Vista (32 bit)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

title  Vista (64 bit)
rootnoverify (hd1,1)
chainloader +1

title  Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

title  MacOS 10.4.8
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

Parting words

And thus, I will be leaving with a "so long old Friend..." Since 1995, there haven't been much of a PC installed by yours truly which didn't display the unmistakable red greetings, and I had become such an expert at writing a /etc/lilo.conf, I could have done it blindfolded.
Still, I gotta give it to the GNU guys... Their solution to the booting problem is deceivingly elegant. I'm especially impressed with the "modify menu.lst on the fly" aspect of things and the fact that dmraid "just" works...