Lewis Shobbrook wrote:

Thanks for the reply Neil,
 

quoted

quoted

Hi All,

I've struck an issue attempting to run lilo when booting to a raid 1 
system using a stock Debain 2.6.4-1-686 unstable release kernel image.
After sucecssfully booting into the raid filesystem, attempts to run 
lilo give me the error...

Fatal: Trying to map files from unnamed device 0x0000 

(NFS/RAID mirror down ?)

You probably need a "raid-extra-boot=" option in lilo.conf
Just list the partition(s) that are currently active and it 
might work.

I've been able to apply the "raid-extra-boot=" option on an alternate
system and did a bit of toying around with the syntax to see what was
required and possible. All was well on the test machine, running the
same 2.6.4-1 kernel, however the problems persist.... 

[snip]

Quite some time ago I discovered the "ultimate solution" for this
lilo/raid stuff (even back when LILO wasn't aware of raid), and I
mentioned it on this (linux-raid) list several times.

Instead of using LILO to install to raid devices, use standard MBR
(comes in `mbr' debian package, install-mbr /dev/sda etc, and LILO
itself may ), mark your
boot raid partitions active and use "boot=/dev/md.." in lilo.conf.
For this to work, you should have your boot partitions at exactly
the same place on all disks, but this isn't a problem in most cases
(after all, boot partition shouldn't be large and it's easy to place
it somewhere at the beginning of the disk, on the same partition).

With raid-extra-boot=/dev/hdc,hda  (hda being marked as failed)...

Fatal: Unable to open dev/hda

With raid-extra-boot=/dev/hdc ...
Fatal: Trying to map files from unnamed device 0x0000 (NFS/RAID mirror
down ?)

Hmm... this is a bug somewhere in lilo it seems...

/mjt