[ale] SuSE woes... GRUB/No Root Partition/Can't mount RAID array

[Ryan Williams]

Background:
I am running SuSE 9.1 on a dual boot system with XP Home.
Partitions are as follows between two 120GB drives:
/dev/md0 125.0GB MD Raid
/dev/hda 111.7GB WD1200JB-00EVA0
/dev/hda1 48.8GB HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 62.9GB Extended
/dev/hda5  2.0GB Linux swap
/dev/hda6 25.6GB Linux native
/dev/hda7 35.1GB Linux RAID
/dev/hdb 111.7GB WD1200JB-00EVA0
/dev/hdb1 89.8GB Linux RAID
/dev/hdb2 21.9GB Win95 FAT32 LBA

Last night after moving the computer's location, SuSE locked up on load. 
After waiting about 10 minutes, I restarted. GRUB came up fine and 
started booting into SuSE, but I was taken to the command line prompt 
which said something like fsck could not run and that I must manually 
correct the issue. So, I put in the SuSE install disc 1 and ran "Repair 
Installed System" from the installer. It found errors with md0, which it 
claimed to repair (on both hda7 and hdb1). Then, when checking the GRUB 
boot loader record, it first claimed "No valid root partition was 
found". I hit "retry" and it proceeded on to tell me "boot loader error 
detected". I hit "repair" and it came up with a proposed boot loader 
setup. I hit "finish" and got the following error:

grub> root (null)
Error 23: Error while parsing number
grub> install --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2/d(hd0)/0x8000(null)/
Error 12: Invalid device requested
grub> quit

After that, GRUB kept giving me errors and wouldn't let me log into 
Linux (I could still get into XP though). So, I went back through and 
tried LILO. The boot loader then worked, but on SuSE load it's exiting 
to a shell and saying the following:

Waiting for device /dev/0 to appear: .....not found -- device nodes:

(then on down)

No root device found; exiting to /bin/sh

Now, I should probably just try to install from scratch. Here's the 
thing though. I have around 100GB of data on the RAID partitions that I 
need to somehow back up before I reinstall. I've tried starting up from 
the SuSE LIVE CD, but it doesn't seem to give me access to mount any of 
the partitions. So, I also started up from Knoppix. It does allow me to 
mount all the partitions EXCEPT hda7 and hdb1, which are the drives in 
the RAID array which I need to get to. It keeps saying something like 
"no valid file system found or was not supplied".

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I can do to get to the data 
on the partitions? I have a third drive I could install and move the 
files to for backup before rebuilding the linux system, but I first need 
to figure out how to either fix the situation with the root device not 
being found so I can finally boot SuSE from the disc OR mount the md0 
RAID partition from Knoppix and move the files to a new drive. Your 
assistance is greatly appreciated.

Ryan Williams