Posted by: Andrea Benini
on September 22 2009
So, you've followed my previous blog: Replacing faulted drive on Linux software RAID (MDTOOLS), you already know how to swap a faulty drive with a new one, but what happens if you need to substitute primary disk where your Computer makes boot ?
After adding a new disk to your raid chain it's a good idea to make it bootable as well by installing grub on MBR. When boot drive in your raid array becomes faulty all you've to do is to power off your machine, substitute your faulty drive and boot your computer again. If you've properly set bios boot sequence to iterate between primary, secondary, ... you can boot your raid array again, second or third HD makes the boot because you've installed grub on it, pretty easy and straightforward, this contributes to have a bulletproof system.
Posted by: Andrea Benini
on May 25 2009
Here's the short tip for this morning, this is a very easy config. As you know you can have a graphical image as a background for your GRUB startup screen, here's a three steps howto for setting it up
- Create or use your favorite image. Open your favorite graphical image program (Gimp for me) and adapt your favorite logo/image/photo to 640x480, no matter about color depth, the must important thing is the image type, you must save your favorite image as an .XPM file (example: myfavoritelogo.xpm)
- gzip your new .xpm file, following my example my file wil be named myfavoritelogo.xpm.gz (command: gzip myfavoritelogo.xpm), copy your image to /boot/grub
- Modify your grub menu (mostly named /boot/grub/menu.lst) to add the following line:
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/myfavoritelogo.xpm.gz
Posted by: Daniel Guzanof
on May 25 2009
With grub2 you can directly boot an (iso9660) ISO using its loopback option. This is great because it provides another nice rescue scenario - for example when using grml (the Debian based Linux Live-CD for sysadmins). You no longer need to extract kernel and initrd from the ISO to be able to boot it using the isofrom bootoption. All you need to do is put a plain grml ISO to your harddisk.
