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I have a Virtual Machine (in ESXi 5.1) running Ubuntu Server 12.04. When I try to boot my system I grub2 tells me "error: unknown filesystem". I've tried booting a Live CD then reinstalling grub from both a chrooted environment and by supplying the --root-directory option. I've even tried a boot-repair CD (results here) and reinstalling grub. Whatever I use to fix it, I'm getting the error "Path `/boot/grub' is not readable by GRUB on boot. Installation is impossible. Aborting."

To complicate things I'm running a RAID5 array (5 disks) using mdadm and btrfs for my filesystem. The btrfs tools that ship with Ubuntu 12.04 are really old. I've added ppa:cjwatson/grub (currently grub2 ver 2.00-2) and ppa:yofel/btrfs (currently btrfs-tools ver. 0.20~git20130524~650e656-0daily13) to my software sources to get more up to date utilities, with no help. The system was previously working before switching from a 4 disk RAID0 setup. I think this may have been the first reboot since the upgrade, but it was running fine for weeks using RAID5.

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  • By adding a listing in device.map for the RAID array, I can get grub-install to run, but booting tells gives me an error of no such device.
    – jbo5112
    Jun 21, 2013 at 1:12

1 Answer 1

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Grub can't actually boot from anything but a raid 1 or raid 0 mdadm device. You will need to add a /boot device somewhere and just set that up in raid 1/0/raw.

I would do something like this

the 2 new volumes below {a,b} can be file backed but should be on separate physical disks. 

/dev/sd{a,b}1 mdadm raid 1 /boot (2 new disks (500MB or so)) 
/dev/sd{c..g}1 mdadm  raid 5 / (current disks)
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  • Not correct. On a workstation, I'm successfully booting a RAID6 mdadm device. There is also a report of booting RAID-5 on the Gentoo forums forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-888624-start-0.html
    – jbo5112
    Jun 18, 2013 at 11:23
  • The kernel's boot time assembly of RAID arrays only works for RAID 0 or 1, but isn't that deprecated for initramfs? I don't find any limit on grub2, but a lot of sources claim it works.
    – jbo5112
    Jun 18, 2013 at 12:21
  • Oh that is very cool. i may have to look into that.
    – Tacticus
    Jun 19, 2013 at 2:15
  • For now, I'm going with this, except using the raid1 support in btrfs (for data checks & easier maintenance). As easy as 2 new virtual disks are to create, I may just wait for them to finish RAID5 support in btrfs before looking at a proper fix without extra disks.
    – jbo5112
    Jun 21, 2013 at 1:21
  • replication with parity in btrfs is just going to be awesome when complete. my next FS upgrade will be to a btrfs based system as well. really good choice.
    – Tacticus
    Jun 23, 2013 at 23:57

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