Re: [eug-lug]new disk in old server
On 20031112.1850, Mr O said ... Um, here I am. You shouldn't have any real trouble booting off your PCI card. As long as the BIOS sees it as a boot device you're in good hands. Linux will just see your drives as /dev/hde or higher. As for booting from SCSI it loads the drivers during the boot. The SCSI BIOS handles getting the drive going. Linux just needs to know where it is from there (ie: /dev/sda). My latest idea is to use the 6GB disk that's in there as the /boot, swap, and backup drive. Then the new drive as the OS and web directory drive on a PCI card. As for attaining full UDMA 100, keep dreaming. Unless you're striping a couple drives with 8Mb cache you'll never see near that performance. Kbob achieved over 90Mb/s that way. On average a 2Mb cache drive will yield about 40Mb/s and an 8Mb cache drive will yield upwards of 60Mb/s by itself. I didn't really mean actual throughput. Just that my motherboard has UDMA33 and I wanted to use the drive in UDMA100 mode, and I can't get that unless I use a PCI card with a new chipset. If your BIOS actually sees 20GB then it should see at least 32GB. In most systems that was the next barrier after 8GB. You may just need to 'fdisk' the drive to see how much the OS sees and experiment. Interesting. I'll have to toy with it again. Thanks, Rob ___ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
Re: [eug-lug]new disk in old server
Rob Hudson wrote: My latest idea is to use the 6GB disk that's in there as the /boot, swap, and backup drive. Then the new drive as the OS and web directory drive on a PCI card. In general, it's a good idea to put a swap partition on every drive in the system. The partitions don't have to be large, but when the system has to swap, it needs all the disk throughput it can get. Also, make sure all partitions have the same priority. (Admittedly, boxes aren't swapping so much now that a gigabyte or more of RAM is common.) tivopc ~ swapon -s FilenameTypeSizeUsedPriority /dev/hda3 partition 2047744 5476100 /dev/hdb2 partition 1000432 0 100 /dev/hdi1 partition 262544 5476100 /dev/hdk1 partition 262544 5480100 -- Bob Miller Kbob kbobsoft software consulting http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
Re: [eug-lug]new disk in old server
It depends on your hardware, AFAIK, and then is up to the kernel, as to how the drives get assigned during boot. Just dealt with some boot seqence issues on SATA drives here at work, and the fix was to pass boot prompt parameters to force an ordering which allowed booting from the desired drive. In my case, I couldn't boot Knoppix from the CD-ROM since the two SATA controllers bumped the auto-assignment of the CDROM drive high enough (ie, hdj IIRC) that Knoppix did not seek it out. You might also want to look at the motherboard manufacturer's site to see if they have a BIOS update which woudl help... regards, Ben On Wed, 12 Nov 2003 10:09:20 -0800 Rob Hudson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | Dear EUGLUG, | | I have a spare 40GB drive I was planning on putting in an old AMD K6-2 | 500 server. The machine is currently running off of a 6GB drive. | I've got 2 of these same machines -- 1 is running my websites, and the | other is at home as a test machine. | | When I put the 40GB drive in there, the motherboard only saw 20GB of | it. So my idea was to get a EIDE PCI card which would have the added | benefit that I could run the 40GB drive at full UDMA100 speed. But | this makes me curious if the kernel will need the driver for the PCI | card, and would that mean I'd have to boot from floppy? Or would it | just mean that the boot partition needs to be at the beginning of the | drive so the motherboard can see it and once Linux is loaded, the rest | of the drive is visible? | | I'm always confused by where Linux overcomes motherboard deficiencies. | | Thanks, | Rob | ___ | EuG-LUG mailing list | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug -- ___ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
Re: [eug-lug]new disk in old server
On 20031112.1047, Ben Barrett said ... It depends on your hardware, AFAIK, and then is up to the kernel, as to how the drives get assigned during boot. Just dealt with some boot seqence issues on SATA drives here at work, and the fix was to pass boot prompt parameters to force an ordering which allowed booting from the desired drive. In my case, I couldn't boot Knoppix from the CD-ROM since the two SATA controllers bumped the auto-assignment of the CDROM drive high enough (ie, hdj IIRC) that Knoppix did not seek it out. Hmm. I've just never used a card to boot my systems. If one has SCSI, how does Linux load the kernel if it needs SCSI drivers to read from the device? I'd imagine a UDMA PCI card would be similar. You might also want to look at the motherboard manufacturer's site to see if they have a BIOS update which woudl help... Yep, I've got the latest. ___ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
Re: [eug-lug]new disk in old server
On Wed, Nov 12, 2003 at 10:09:20AM -0800, Rob Hudson wrote: I have a spare 40GB drive I was planning on putting in an old AMD K6-2 500 server. The machine is currently running off of a 6GB drive. I've got 2 of these same machines -- 1 is running my websites, and the other is at home as a test machine. When I put the 40GB drive in there, the motherboard only saw 20GB of it. So my idea was to get a EIDE PCI card which would have the added benefit that I could run the 40GB drive at full UDMA100 speed. But this makes me curious if the kernel will need the driver for the PCI card, and would that mean I'd have to boot from floppy? Or would it just mean that the boot partition needs to be at the beginning of the drive so the motherboard can see it and once Linux is loaded, the rest of the drive is visible? I'm always confused by where Linux overcomes motherboard deficiencies. I have one of these I was using on my x86 box. No longer using it, so if you are looking for one cheap, make an offer. =) The challenge for me was getting it to boot off the drive. Seems that my BIOS knows the IDE card isn't a SCSI interface, so telling it to boot SCSI didn't work. I had to make sure no other HDs in the system were bootable in order to use it. Linux saw the first drive on the IDE card as /dev/hde which made for interesting lilo and grub setup. It's a Promise chipset, so you do need the appropriate driver in the kernel, and it must be compiled in since it's for the boot device. 2.4.19 and above have the necessary driver for the ATA100 controllers. ___ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
Re: [eug-lug]new disk in old server
Um, here I am. You shouldn't have any real trouble booting off your PCI card. As long as the BIOS sees it as a boot device you're in good hands. Linux will just see your drives as /dev/hde or higher. As for booting from SCSI it loads the drivers during the boot. The SCSI BIOS handles getting the drive going. Linux just needs to know where it is from there (ie: /dev/sda). As for attaining full UDMA 100, keep dreaming. Unless you're striping a couple drives with 8Mb cache you'll never see near that performance. Kbob achieved over 90Mb/s that way. On average a 2Mb cache drive will yield about 40Mb/s and an 8Mb cache drive will yield upwards of 60Mb/s by itself. As for myself, I'm using a huge 160GB drive and do use lba32 for booting since WinXP is on the first 30GB. If your BIOS actually sees 20GB then it should see at least 32GB. In most systems that was the next barrier after 8GB. You may just need to 'fdisk' the drive to see how much the OS sees and experiment. That be all from me for now. Hope it's helpful. Mr O. --- Bob Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hmm. I've just never used a card to boot my systems. If one has SCSI, how does Linux load the kernel if it needs SCSI drivers to read from the device? I'd imagine a UDMA PCI card would be similar. Mr. O will eventually check his mail and tell us the right answer, but in the meantime, we amateurs get to guess. I don't think your PC is old enough to be limited to 20 GB disks. Check the Large Disk HOWTO, especially section 5.1, LILO and the `lba32' and 'linear' options. Also see section 5.4. http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO.html __ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree ___ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
