Upgrading to Jessie with MD RAID
The other day I finally got around to upgrading my desktop PC from debian wheezy to jessie. On the whole it was a painless upgrade, and consisted of:
apt-get update
apt-get -y dist-upgrade
sed --in-place -e 's/wheezy/jessie/g' /etc/apt/sources.list \
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/*
apt-get update
apt-get -y dist-upgrade
reboot
Unfortunately at this point things went a little wrong, as the new kernel couldn’t see my MD RAID devices. /proc/mdstat was empty, and I got an error about the root device missing. After a bit of research I discovered that the kernel wasn’t waiting long enough for the RAID to become active, which was easily fixed by changing GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub to "quiet rootdelay=1" and running update-grub.
Once that was fixed it was just a case of removing the nvidia drivers I was using and installing the nvidia-legacy-304xx-driver package instead. Just installing the package didn’t work as X11 kept trying to use the non-legacy drivers which don’t work with my ancient card, but removing the nvidia-kernel-319.72 package sorted it out.
Overall the experience of jessie has been good, it seems to boot a bit quicker, and nothing else seems to have been broken in the upgrade. Much easier than squeeze to wheezy which ruined apt when I tried it a few years ago!