Dual Boot: Near Disaster…

Today has been a little emotional…

I decided I wanted to dual boot a server with Fedora 15 and Oracle VM 3.0.1. The machine already had Fedora 15 on, so I moved some stuff around to free up a 1.5TB drive and decided to install OVM on that.

The installation went well, but I made the schoolboy error of overwriting the bootloader on the MBR. After the restart it was all completely toilet. 🙁 This incident left me checking my underwear because the Fedora installation contained a load of VMs, including RAC and Data Guard installations. None of them were that important, but they would be a pig to set up again.

To sort it I booted from the Fedora 15 DVD and did a repair, telling it to recreate the bootloader on the MBR. A few seconds later, normal service was resumed. Phew.

So then I retried the OVM installation on the clean drive, remembering not to place the bootloader on the MBR this time. The installation went fine again. I booted into Fedora 15, edited my “/etc/grub.conf” to include a chainloader entry. I rebooted and picked the chainloader line from my grub screen only to find I got “Error 21: Selected disk not found”.

After a bit of investiagtion it seems only my RAID1 system disk is visible to grub. The controller doesn’t seem to be able to present the individual disks, unless I kill the RAID1 config. Crappy controller.

So I now have two options:

1. Buy another disk (or move this “spare” one) and put it into another machine with a sane controller and dual boot that.
2. Buy another box that is dedicated to OVM.

I kind like option 2, since dual boot is a total pain. All my boxes have a purpose and having something missing while I play with OVM is not ideal. Trouble is it’s more money and it is a machine that is likely to be unused a lot of the time. Seems a bit of a waste.