RE: Re: Booting from a PCI SATA card

From: Leif Sawyer <lsawyer@gci.com>
Date: Thu Dec 21 2006 - 09:10:11 AKST

mike figley continued the thread where
> Damien Hull wrote asking:
>> I'm trying to boot from a PCI SATA card and it's not
>> working. Here's what happens.
>>
>> 1. Grub comes up
>> 2. It runs through a few lines until it gets to "boot"
>> 3. The system reboots
>>
>> I did a quick Google search and found a website that says you
>> can't boot from a PCI SATA card. It has something to do with
>> the BIOS not seeing the card/drives. The BIOS is unable to
>> pass the information to linux/grub.
>>
>> Can someone tell me if this is true? I thought about
>> getting a couple of IDE drives to boot from but I don't want
>> to spend any money if I don't have to.
>>
>> I'll be running a few tests tonight. If I find out anything
>> new I'll post it on the list.
>
> 2 things i would try:
>
> 1) From bios setup see if you can enable something such as
> "boot offboard cards first" or enable booting from "SCSI"
> first.
>
> 2) Boot a live distro, and look at dmesg or /var/log/messages
> to see if your SATA get detected and if so, which driver
> gets assigned. I think latest Vector and Puppy releases and others
> have some SATA support builtin.
>
I used the Adaptec 1210SA sata card for about 18 months.
booted every time on my circa-1997 P3-1000 system.

my bios just saw it as a 'scsi' adapter, and didn't have any issues
passing control over to it. Yep, I needed an initrd with my driver
in there (stupid redhat only binary driver stupid adaptec stupidity)
but it did work in raid mode like that - yes, even though it was
really software raid. Yes, I finally gave up on it and pulled it
out of my system.

I'm now using... uh... Wait, don't tell me... umm.. Ooh! hold on,
I can remote in, because I left the system on. heheh..
Ah, yes.. it's a 3ware Escalade 7000/8000 sata raid.

But it's a nice hw-raid sata pci card. Very nice. and no more
binary drivers, and no more initrd, because the drivers are
built into the kernel and fully open. woo!

My bioses are only ever set to boot "external first"

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Received on Thu Dec 21 09:10:25 2006

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