On 04/02/10 09:47, walt wrote:
On 04/02/2010 08:46 AM, Joseph wrote:
On 04/02/10 09:42, Neil Bothwick wrote:
On Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:47:09 -0700, walt wrote:
However, if you want to leave both cables connected and change your
BIOS to boot from 'sdb', you will need to edit some of the files on
'sdb',
Check your BIOS first, some allow you to disable individual SATA ports,
so you can disconnect the drive without pulling cables.
--
Neil Bothwick
Good suggestion, but I'm not sure my motherboard BIOS supports it.
I have GA-MA790GP-DS4H motherboard, reading from the manual:
it has OnChip SATA Type (SATA2_0 ~ SATA2_3 connectors)
Mode: Native IDE
RAID
AHCI - Advanced Host Controller to enable advanced Serial ATA features such as
Native Command Queuing and hot plug.
Is it the one AHCI? I've never used it. I'm more interested in configuring it as an
auxiliary drive "sdb" to serve as a bootable backup. The box will be installed
in a remote location and I'll have an ssh access to it.
The box is running in a medical clinic and I'm mostly concern that after the emerge if something happens, I
want the user to be able to boot "grub" from second drive, and it will be "sdb" (hd1);
but during normal operation, when running from "sda" I want
to backup some application files to it so "sdb" stays current.
Ah, well, having only remote access rules out unplugging cables or changing
BIOS settings unless there is someone at the site who can do those things.
Seems like you would be better off to set up grub on sda so it can boot from
sda by default, but also so a remote user can just choose sdb from grub's menu.
That assumes that sda is physically intact enough to load grub from sda. You
seem to be more worried about software screwups than hardware failure. But
you will need to edit the handful of config files on sdb so all the right
filesystems will mount correctly.
As I've mentioned earlier I have enough backups on another system, so I'm not
much worry about hardware failure.
From my years of experience with Gentoo, I'm more worry about things working
correctly after emerge :-/
I've made list what I need to do, but I'm not sure if this is all:
1.) Boot from external CD
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
2.)
modify (add to) grub.conf on sda
#title boot sda current
title=1st HD sda Kernel Current
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/kernel-current root=/dev/sda3
#title boot sdb current
title=2nd HD sdb Kernel Current
root (hd1,0)
kernel /boot/kernel-current root=/dev/sdb3
3.) Modify fstab
You have mentioned to use "rdev" but reading man pages it is only i386, and all
my boxes running amd64 (x86_64).
--
Joseph
