On Tue, Oct 12, 1999 at 08:50:26PM -0700, Marc Merlin wrote:
> On mar, oct 12, 1999 at 11:44:23 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > Though, how does the PC handle things booting up if the drive on
> > controller 0, ID 0 has gone bad? I expect this is another case where
>
> I don't think it will boot, unless you have a boot floppy as a backup that
> will boot on the second hard drive if the first one fails, and the boot
> process falls back to floppy.
With IDE drives, you can (at least on a few newer BIOSes where I've tried it)
set your drives to ``autodetect'' so that the BIOS won't complain if one drive
is missing.
Then, with identical /boot partitions on both drives, and the system booting
on RAID-1, you system will boot no matter which drive you pull out of it.
No need to reconfigure the BIOS or anything else.
Of course, if a drive is ``sick'' in a way so that the BIOS will find it nicely
and attempt to boot on it, but the boot/kernel data area has bad blocks, then
you'll have to physically pull out the drive before you can boot the system again.
But I dont' think this is much of an issue, at least with IDE, since the system
will usually stay perfectly stable with a bad disk and RAID in degraded mode. The
system will not have to boot, before you take it down to pull the bad disk out
anyway.
This is at least my experience. I've had a few bad IDE drives lately, on systems
booting on RAID-1, and I have been able to wait for some convenient time to take
the system down, pull out the bad drive, boot up again, end of story.
> Again, it can be made to work, but it'd be a hack.
It's been some time since I had SCSI drive failures. Mostly because all new systems
I work with are IDE ones :)
So I can't really comment much on that. Last time I had an SCSI drive failing,
the system went down with it, because of the SCSI driver/layer.
> > There's nothing (that I know of) stopping anyone from buying Intel
> > Astor/AstorII/Cabrillo-C server chassis and making use of their hot-swap
> > bays without hardware RAID. The Astor chassis are surprising cheap too.
>
> True, but a real disk shelf with dual power supply, diagnostic LEDs, and
> some SCSI logic to handle drives that go bad and possibly send crap over the
> SCSI bus, is still better :-)
Definitely. If you're not on a budget :)
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:.........................: putrid forms of man :
: Jakob Østergaard : See him rise and claim the earth, :
: OZ9ABN : his downfall is at hand. :
:.........................:............{Konkhra}...............:
