I have been getting spanked by something throughout the day that Adaptec
and Tyan tech. support have bounced to each other. I have built this
aforementioned server with 2gb ram on Tyan's Tiger mboard with the MPX
chipset for dual athlons. The drive setup of choice is a raid5 scsi
array controlled by Adaptec's 3210s controller. For testing, moving
things around, and for off disk archiving, I have placed an IDE drive on
the secondary controller.
Redhat's 7.3 install does a great job of recognizing and loading the
drivers for the raid controller. (7.2 required and expert install and
loading the drivers from floppy) The problem, of sorts, comes up when I
choose where to put GRUB. The MBR is on the IDE drive. While I can
boot this way, and, being a production server, rebooting ought not come
up much, it is disturbing that I can't put the MBR on the drives that
have the most reliability.
I'm smart, so I think, and I'm smarter than this motherboard, so I
think, so I take some action. I take out the ide drive. (after ALWAYS
disconnecting power cables) I reboot, make sure that the ide is gone
from bios, adjust my boot order in bios to put the raid controller
(which shows up specifically) second in line behind the cd rom, and I
reboot. Bios posts, raid controller posts, cdrom spins up to boot from,
blank screen. Reboot, Try again. Reboot, Try again. Reset bios to
defaults, try again, reset bios eeprom or whatever that thing is, try
again. Each time I hear the cdrom spin up, I see the floppy drive light
come on, and it is clear that my bios is searching the order I gave it
to boot from. It just won't boot anything. Open case, disconnect raid
array from controller, reboot, this time after posting, etc., the CD
spins up and installation begins. Damn. Turn off box, reconnect array,
reboot, cdrom spins up and system stays blank. Curses. Turn off,
reconnect IDE drive, reboot, CD spins up this time and installation
begins. While in Disk Druid I notice this little slice on the ide drive
before the two partitions I put there earlier. It is my MBR. My
computer seems to like it. So does my install CD. My CD only boots
when it is there. I don't like it as much because it is not where I
want it. I curse the MBR.
Adaptec says that it is supposed to boot and there must be something
wrong with the mboard. Tyan says they get this alot and that I need to
make sure my controller is BBS or something like that, compliant. I
wrote the acronym down at work, but I am not there. Apparently the
controller is compliant, that's why I can see it specifically in Tyan's
bios boot order. The problem here may not be with either. The problem
may be with scott :-)
I have a question after all this, I think. How can I put the MBR on the
RAID array? I have never had to "put" and MBR anywhere, but perhaps I
must boot from a floppy and format the mbr or something. I don't think
that I can boot with a win98 floppy and run fdisk mbr to do this. Is
there something comically easy that I am missing? Does any wise soul
have a suggestion or some insight into this? You know, come to think of
it. I did not try to boot with another installation CD. Surely this
couldn't be an issue, could it?
I curse the MBR
scott
- [luau] bootable raid and the MBR R. Scott Belford
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