Brand New User - Some Problems with Installation

[Alan Chandler]

Hi

I have been a long time Debian user, running their unstable version on 
my desktop since the late 1990s. I have a Core 2 Duo processor and was 
running in 64 bit mode.  However, I have decided that I wanted to back 
off from being at the bleeding edge ALL the time, whilst I didn't want 
to go as far back from the bleeding edge as Debian Stable (which I run 
on my home server).  Since upgrading to 64 bit mode, I haven't seen any 
particular benefits, and quite a lot of downsides, so I decided to 
install the standard Intel '86 version.  Since I am a KDE user, kubuntu 
is the obvious choice - and since I am still relatively brave I 
installed 8.04-beta.

Because of the downgrade to 32bit, it really means an install from 
scratch, but ensuring I don't erase the partitions containing the my 
data.  I think some of this is the cause of the problems.

I have a pair of SATA drives each configured in 4 identical partitions. 
100MB /boot partition, 2G swap, 4G root, 154G LVM.  The 1st, 3rd and 
4th Partitions are three separate RAID devices.  The 4th Partition has 
LVM on it, as a Volume Group on top of the RAID.  My data that I needed 
to keep was all on Logical Volumes in the VG, but through experience of 
with Debian, the 4G root device is not big enough and various strategic 
directories (/var/cache, /var/lib, /usr/lib/openoffice, /usr/share) are 
also logical volumes too.

Using a lot of manaual input to the partition section of installation, I 
was able to configure my new solution to reformat the filesystems on 
root, /boot, and the 4 other lv mentioned above, but leave the rest 
intact, and proceeded to install.

However, when it came to install grub as the boot loader it failed 
totally.  When I checked on virtual terminal 4, the log was complete 
rubbish.

I was able to recover and finish installation (after about 3 of 4 
attempts, starting from scratch each time) by rebooting the original 
CD, going into rescue mode and starting a shell, mounting all my key 
volumes and then using apt-get install to install grub.  I then ran 
grub-install to manually install it in /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.  I 
finally called update-grub to create a menu.lst file and make the 
initrd images etc.

Upon reboot I appeared to have a working system.

Since I am new around here, I am not sure if this is a known problem 
with raid installations, or indeed where I should be reporting the 
issue. Can someone point me in the right direction. 

Thanks

-- 
Alan Chandler
http://www.chandlerfamily.org.uk