Re: Not booting

On Saturday 28 February 2009 22:07, someone identifying as *Johannes
Beekhuizen* wrote in /comp.os.linux.hardware:/

Hello,

I have an ASUS P5ND2-SLI motherboard running SlackWare12.1.
Today I tried to set up the RAID feature, but because it didn't
seem to do much, I also disabled it again.
Now the system does not bot from hard disk: after the welcome
screen I only get a blinking underline.
Booting from DVD and floppy works as usual.
I also reloaded the default BIOS setup and reran lilo, but
that didn't help either.
What may be wrong and how can I put it right?
The disk itself seems to be alright: I am now running the
system by booting it from the installation DVD.
Thanks for ant useful help.

I don't know exactly what kind of RAID you were trying to implement - by the
way, you need a minimum of two disks for RAID 0 or RAID 1, a minimum of
three disks for RAID 5 or a minimum of four disks for RAID 6 - but it is
possible that by activating the RAID functionality in the BIOS, it may have
rewritten the master boot record of your hard disk.

I'm not too well-versed on on-board RAID solutions, but a true hardware RAID
set-up normally performs a special kind of low level format on a disk so
that it can be used with that particular RAID controller and that
particular RAID configuration.

On-board RAID controllers are usually only hardware-assisted software RAID
solutions, but it is possible that your partition tables and/or other
information of your master boot record have been overwritten. You should
have documented yourself properly on what RAID is and how it works before
you proceeded.

I'm afraid my only advice in this would be to either totally reinstall your
distribution and have it properly write the partition tables and bootloader
configuration to the MBR again - which would be the easiest way out - *or*
to use some partition editor and check your partition tables, or perhaps
another forensics tool to examine the layout of your master boot record,
although other posters here might offer another solution to your problem.

I am also not excluding the possibility - given how little I know of what
this on-board RAID chip does - that your disk may need to be re-initialized
again for single-disk use, which /might/ encompass a low level format.

Other people's mileage will vary on this one...

--
*Aragorn*
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)
.

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