I am trying to install IPFire 2.29 (latest ISO 192) and running into an issue with the RAID-1 config. It sets up the using both disks, yet then tries to write the bootloader to a /dev/sda, which fails with “Failed the install Bootloader”.
It seems this MAY be a known issue, yet nothing definitive. It seems since it’s part of the core installer process it should work, yet perhaps there’s some sort of regression?
It seems to me that it’s creating entire disk MD devices, then trying to write grub to a mounted physical device. device. Hard to tell it’s exact logic, yet this same box has no problem installing other operating systems with software (MD or ZFS) RAID.
Hoping for some insight.
Few edits, I don’t have secureboot on, it’s a UEFI system (a bit older Supermicro Xeon, generation just before scalable), selecting EXT4 as the file system.
I have raid systems set up on all my vm testbed systems and not had any problems with them except for the issue with CU168.
I just installed CU192 onto a vm testbed system and it installed the raid system, installed the filesystem, installed the language cache, then installed the bootloader and successfully came to the reboot stage.
Reboot worked fine and it took me into the network installation section.
So I can’t reproduce your issue.
Maybe someone on the forum more experienced with the boot process in IPFire can comment on what sort of issues would result in that error message.
Trying various things now and will report back. I pull those out of Claude, I actually don’t think they’re applicable, so I removed them from the post. Other option, setup a mirror post boot, yet I’d rather not if this works during install as being somewhat of an “appliance”, I’d rather have the scripts do the work so everything is setup properly. Just tried XFS, same issue. Don’t really want to mess to BTRFS, even though it should work without MD devices, being it’s listed as beta and I’m running into issues already.
Ah, your screenshot helped. The error message was slightly different from what you put in the first post. Now I am able to find that message in the code.
It is coming from the IPFire installer main.c program and is triggered by the hw_install_bootloader subroutine in hw.c that is used for installing the bootloader and is used irrespective of whether raid is being used or not so that would definitely make it interesting to test out with just a single drive install to see if you have a generic issue or if it is an issue with the raid generation.
Confirmed, no issue with single disk. So, something isn’t working properly with MD creation and bootloader config in this release on my box. Happy to help troubleshoot, since It’s not in prod yet, let me know what I can offer.
I can do that for sure. Is it valid to create my MD post install, being that it won’t run the installer I want to be sure that I won’t be messing anything else up. Any feedback here would be appreciated as I hoped to get this in place today.
However 2012 is a long time ago so I can’t be sure that what is written there is still fully applicable but it should give a reasonable starting point.
I would also say that how it is described on that page is not how the IPFire install is doing it as IPFire does not end up with any mdadm.conf file.
Figured it out, I had an MD signature at the end of one disk it was finding, after wiping the last few MB it worked as expected. Ultimately I had to use DD, tried wipefs -a also a zap, not good enough. Perhaps this helps someone in the future.
