A little knowledge is a dangerous thing ...
Tried to upgrade to 2.2pre7. Stupidly thought that this kernel supported
Raid 0 partitions without patching. Ended up nuking my whole Linux
installation. Here's how I had the system set up:
one normal ext2 128 meg partition
one raid 0 partition (3 gigs total)
I use the smaller partition to boot from and mount root off the raid
partition. I can also mount root from the smaller partition (mainly for
maintenance et al). So, when I made the new kernel, I over-wrote my working
kernel on the smaller partition (very stupid, sure, but I thought sure I had
good kernels on floppy (which I didn't - now this is championship caliber
stupidity)).
Run lilo. Reboot - lilo's screwed, can't get to boot prompt. I give it the
old "fdisk /mbr". Now I can at least get into NT to download the rescue
disks I need to fix lilo. This bit works. Reboot and try to mount root
from the raid partition. No go, kernel panic etc. Reboot and try to mount
root from the smaller partition. Works fine but still can't mount the raid
partition.
So this is where I am now. My thinking is that I'll free up the NT
partition, reinstall Linux there (so that I have enough room to install
egcs, gcc, kernel sources etc). At this point, I can build a kernel that
should be able to mount the raid partition. From there, I'm all set.
My question is this: did I totally screw myself when I did the "fdisk
/mbr"? I'm a bit confused because the 2.2pre7 kernel should (I think) have
been able to mount the raid partition when it was not the root of the file
system (this was the case when I mounted root from the smaller partition).
If so, then something's very wrong.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Advice I can do without - I've been kicking myself
over this for days now :)
E
