Why wont Xubuntu boot if I add a 3rd hard drive?

[Red Squirrel]

I currently have 2 hard drives, both SSDs. I wanted to add a 1TB HDD drive so I can try a new distro without having to format my current one, and if it works out then I'd just image it over to the SSD to replace my current install, and keep the 1TB for general temp/backup storage. But if I add the 3rd drive, the system fails to boot, and it just drops me to some shell. It also said my raid (which I don't have) was degraded and prompted me if I wanted to start with it or not. I have no raid. It's possible that drive was part of a raid before, but I don't care about it, I just want to format it.

Any way around this? This is the screen I get:



Had to pull the drive out to be able to boot.

 

[MrColin]

Your bios is confused about which HD to boot and it appears to think one of them is part of a raid array. Move the 3rd drive to a non-raid SATA port and point your bios to boot from the drive that has GRUB installed.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Was already set as the 3rd drive on a non raid port.

I think I just got it to work. I put it in another system and wrote a bunch of zeros to the start of the drive.

 

[Nothinman]

Most likely the new drive still had remnants of being in an array and the Linux dmraid driver tried to start that array when it found it.

As to why you got dumped to the initramfs prompt, that usually means it can't find the root filesystem and bails and it's impossible to tell why from just that screenshot. Usually it's because of BIOS disk order like MrColin says which is why new distros use UUIDs or filesystem labels to work around that. Did you change anything that may have caused the system to go back to old device nodes (e.g. /dev/sda1) instead of persistent identifiers.

 

[Red Squirrel]

No changes, but the new drive was /dev/sdc so not sure why it would try to do anything with it. It's good now though, I was able to install another distro on it and I can boot it from the bios if I select it. Could probably add an entry in the grub menu, but just testing anyway so wont bother messing with that.

 

[Nothinman]

No changes, but the new drive was /dev/sdc so not sure why it would try to do anything with it. It's good now though, I was able to install another distro on it and I can boot it from the bios if I select it. Could probably add an entry in the grub menu, but just testing anyway so wont bother messing with that.

Then something is wrong with your install because every distro out there these days uses static identifiers because device nodes aren't static and can/will change even across just a reboot. What's /dev/sdc today could be /dev/sda tomorrow depending on driver load order, drive spinup time, etc. For instance, the SSD holding my / and /home filesystems at home is currently /dev/sdb. Adding another drive wouldn't affect the UUIDs, LVM info, filesystem labels, etc so something else had to be going on.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Then something is wrong with your install because every distro out there these days uses static identifiers because device nodes aren't static and can/will change even across just a reboot. What's /dev/sdc today could be /dev/sda tomorrow depending on driver load order, drive spinup time, etc. For instance, the SSD holding my / and /home filesystems at home is currently /dev/sdb. Adding another drive wouldn't affect the UUIDs, LVM info, filesystem labels, etc so something else had to be going on.

I don't know, I just hit install and hit next a few times until it was done... there was not really much to the install. Though my screen was flickering like made due to my issues so it was a pretty terrible experience and I may have gone fast and missed an option I had to change, but I don't recall anything of that nature. I used default everything.

In the fstab it appears to be using UUIDs.

root@falcon:~# cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=951a63e8-0af7-42d3-bf69-7d6c1ebc50f9 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
#UUID=f4091ae7-964c-45d2-9366-5900f807018f none            swap    sw              0       0
root@falcon:~#