Re: Booting from a PCI SATA card ( it works! )

Leif Sawyer wrote:
> 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"
>
>
> -- Binary/unsupported file stripped by Ecartis --
> -- Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
> -- File: smime.p7s
>
>
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>
She boots!

You may be on to something here. I was trying to install on an old
compaq. I couldn't get it to work. I just switched to a P4 something. It
boots software RAID 1. The drives are syncing as I type.

The BIOS in this system has more options. One of them is SCSI. There is
also "Other". I'm not sure what that means but I included it in the boot
order. I'm not sure if any of this makes a difference but the system boots.

I'm not sure how stable this system is. The plan was to migrate all my
data to it. With all the trouble I've been having I'm not sure I want to
do that. I'll run a few tests before I put it into production.

Oh, don't know which 3ware card you have but I've seen 4 port ones for
$140 or so. One of my clients has the top of the line version. It can
take 16 drives. The command line interface is a little tricky to use but
it shows you a lot of information. I was thinking about getting the 4
port version. However, my important data only took up 16G of space.
Can't justify spending extra money for drive space I may not use.

Well, time to pay with my new RAID set.
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Received on Thu Dec 21 09:52:57 2006