Hello list, Hardly had I said that MBR had caused me no problems in years, guess what? It did. I tried to mount /boot (ext2) to install a new kernel but it couldn't be mounted - wrong fs type or some such. When I got it mounted as ext4 it looked fine. Fsck had found nothing wrong either, but fdisk showed the wrong partition as Active. /boot is on /dev/md1 which is RAID-1 built on /dev/sd[ab]1, so sda1 should have been marked Active (it was when I set it up), but the spare, empty sda2 was instead.
On booting a rescue system and correcting the Active flag with fdisk, all the files in it disappeared. So I put them back in and booted the main system. Same all over again. In the end I just zapped /, /var, /usr/portage etc, restored from an older backup, synced and emerged -e world. Then restoring the files in /boot resulted in a stable system. Looks like time I investigated GPT or BTRFS. But I don't want to go from GRUB legacy to GRUB-2. Is that possible? -- Rgds Peter
