Due to a cascading series of failures (some of hardware, some of my brain), I
find myself in the following situation:
I had a linux-raid two-drive system that was working fine for many years. The
system uses legacy BIOS booting. My notes from long ago say that both drives
had a working GRUB; but it seems that my notes were wrong: one of the drives
died without warning, leaving me with a drive with a fully-functioning trixie
(and all the user data, etc.) present, but that drive seems to have no working
GRUB in the MBR. Trying to boot it gives me a "grub-rescue>" prompt.
I've scoured the Internet, but have been unable to find any clear,
unambiguous, step-by-step guide as to how to make this drive remaining
functioning drive bootable, either from the "grub-rescue>" prompt or by some
other mechanism. I tried a couple of rescue disks that I located on the
Internet, but they both errored out when I attempted to "rescue" the drive. So
I've given up, at least for now, on trying to fix the problem from the
"grub-rescue>" prompt.
I can physically remove the drive and place it on a functioning machine, and
have done so. With the drive in the functioning machine, I have checked that
indeed all the data on it (that were in the original "/" hierarchy) are
readable. So I just want to find a way to install GRUB on the MBR in a way
that will cause the disk to be bootable into the system that was on it. That
is, I want to be able to remove the disk from the functioning machine that
it's currently (temporarily) on, put the drive back in the original machine,
power on, and have the system come up as it used to (except now with just one
active drive in the RAID array).
From there I can add a new drive to the array and get myself back a
fully-functioning two-drive RAID-based system.
I hope that that's a pretty clear description of the problem. If more
information is needed, I can of course provide it.
I hope that someone here understands all this GRUB-and-boot stuff better than
I do, and can provide steps that my child-like brain can follow to get me back
to a working system.
Doc
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Web: http://enginehousebooks.com/drevans
