On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 11:39 PM, Duncan <1i5t5.dun...@cox.net> wrote: <SNIP> > > Hope it helps... > > -- > Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
Immensely! OK, a quick update and keeping it short for now: 1) I dumped the RAID install Sunday. It's new hardware and it wasn't booting, I didn't know why but I do know how to install Gentoo without RAID so I went for simple instead of what I wanted. That said the machine still didn't boot. Same "no bootable media" message. After scratching my head for an hour it dawned on me that maybe this BIOS actually required /boot to be marked bootable. I changed that and the non-RAID install booted and is running Gentoo at this time. This is the only machine of 10 in this house that requires that but at least it's a reasonable fix. The machine now runs XFCE & Gnome, X seems fine so far, haven't messed with sound, etc., so the bootable flag was the key this time around. 2) Even non-RAID I'm having some troubles with the machine. (kernel bugs in dmesg) I've asked a question in the LKML and gotten one response, as well as on the Linux-RAID list, but I'm not making much headway there yet. I'll likely post something here today or tomorrow in some other thread with a better title having to do with 100% waits for long periods of time. Those are probably non-Gentoo so I am hesitant to start a thread here and bother anyone but I suspect that you or others will probably have some good ideas at least about what to look at. 3) I LOVE your idea of managing 3 /boot partitions by hand instead of using RAID. Easy to do, completely testable ahead of time. If I ensure that every disk can boot then no matter what disk goes down the machine still works, at least a little. Not that much work and even if I don't do it for awhile it doesn't matter as I can do repairs without a CD. (well....) 4) You're correct that the guide did md4 as striped. I forgot to say that I didn't. I used RAID1 there also as my needs for this machine are reliability not speed. 5) Last for now, I figured that once the machine was running non-RAID I could always redo the RAID1 install from within Gentoo instead of using the install CD. That's where I'm at now but not sure if I'll do that yet due to the issue in #2. As always, thanks very much for the detailed post. Lots of good stuff there! Cheers, Mark
