Chris Kloiber of Red Hat Enterprise Support gave another suggestion
(attached). I was thinking the same thing although I thought you tried
this already. I can SSH into the box and transfer the GRUB to the MBR
of your SCSI array if you want.
Please give me a call anytime before midnight. I will e-mail you my
phone number directly.
--- Begin Message ---
On Sat, 2002-05-25 at 00:56, Warren Togami wrote:
> Another difficult question from my local LUG. Is it possible to install
> GRUB and boot directly off of the Adaptec RAID 5?
>
> Thanks for your support.
> Warren Togami
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> ----
>
> From: R. Scott Belford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [luau] bootable raid and the MBR
> Date: 24 May 2002 18:46:09 -1000
>
> 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.
The boot record is on the disconnected IDE drive. Boot from it,
reconfigure GRUB or LILO to install a boot record on the MBR of the
array, and write it there. Make a boot floppy just in case, then power
down and remove the IDE drive and try rebooting from the Hardware RAID
array.
> 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?
Never tried it with grub yet, but with LILO you edit the first line of
/etc/lilo.conf (may be /etc/lilo.conf.anaconda in 7.3) to tell it where
the bootloader should be installed. Save the file and run 'lilo -v -v'
--
**********************************************************************
Chris Kloiber, RHCE Red Hat,Inc.
Hardware Certification aka 1801 Varsity Dr.
Enterprise Support "WireHead" Raleigh, NC 27606
**********************************************************************
_______________________________________________
Valhalla-list mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/valhalla-list
--- End Message ---
