[luau] bootable raid and the MBR

R. Scott Belford sctinc at flex.com
Mon Jun 24 03:32:01 PDT 2002


For what it is worth, none of the wise suggestions below or in earlier 
phases of this post resolved the problem.  Two controllers and three 
motherboards later, the mbr is on the raid array where it belongs.  It 
was a mess getting here.  Sometimes when something is not working the 
way it should, it is because it is broken.  Kudos to Adaptec and Tyan 
tech support.  Both are first class.

Part of this project involved a post asking how much swap space to use 
for 2gb of ram.  It was suggested by a buddy of Warren's at RedHat that 
I should still double the ram for swap space.  Turns out the the 
installation of Red Hat 7.2 Professional will not allow one to choose 
any more than 2 gb of swap space in spite of how much ram is on the 
mboard.

scott

>
>> 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.
>
> Thanks a ton, Warren.  I am going to piddle with it this morning.  If I 
> have listened better to Eric last night, I might have seen this.
>
>> From: Chris Kloiber <ckloiber at redhat.com>
>> Date: Fri May 24, 2002  09:21:10 PM Pacific/Honolulu
>> To: valhalla-list at redhat.com
>> Subject: Re: [luau] bootable raid and the MBR
>> Reply-To: valhalla-list at redhat.com
>>
>> 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.
>
> The simplicity pains me.  Why is brilliance always so simple?
>
>>
>>> 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'
>
> Wow.  I curse Scott for not looking at this.  Curse Scott.  :-)  Praise 
> to Warren and his Wise Friend.  I have Learned.
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