[luau] bootable raid and the MBR

[R. Scott Belford]

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.

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?

I curse the MBR

scott