David wrote on 1/30/26 11:28 PM:
Before we get lost in all the details again, can we do a sanity check: Do you really need to take this approach?
Good question, and one that I've been asking myself with increasing frequency over the past few days, particularly when the grub-rescue sub-thread led to failure.
I spent much of yesterday trying various things that have been suggested here, with an increasing feeling that there's something fundamentally wrong -- but with no idea what that something might be.
So yesterday afternoon, I did exactly this:
You say that the old disk is readable when put into another functioning machine. So another approach could be to build a brand new RAID system and just recover whatever old data you need off the old disk.
I haven't yet copied the data off the old disk, because there's a lot of work to be done configuring things on the new system first (I don't want to simply copy system configuration files from the old disk: that seems a dangerous thing to do; fine for user data, but not for system configuration). But once I'm happy that I have a properly functioning system on the new disks, I'll rsync the user files across to the new disks and put this all behind me.
Several times over the past couple of weeks I have found myself longing for a good old-fashioned O'Reilly book on GRUB (for which the cover would be obvious :-) ), but it seems that there was never such a thing -- and in any case it would be long out of date now. And that kind of detailed book dedicated to a relatively small aspect of Linux it seems is no longer produced or updated.
I do wish that I at least understood what made my situation turned out to be so unresolvable. But at some point one just throws in the towel: when I looked around the room and saw a multitude of sheets of e-mail printouts scattered around and covered with scribbled annotations, to the point that I could no longer keep track, I realised that, as they say, discretion is the better part of valour, and I should start afresh with a new system.
Thanks to everyone who tried to help. It's quite frustrating that I can't change the subject to include "SOLVED", but I suppose that's life.
Doc -- Web: http://enginehousebooks.com/drevans
