Re: Software raid, booting and bios

[Roman Mamedov <rm@romanrm.ru>]

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On Fri, 20 May 2011 10:33:00 +0200
Paul van der Vlis <paul@vandervlis.nl> wrote:

> You can select the "boot device priority" where you can choose about
> devices types (DVD, harddisk, USB, network) but you can choose only one
> SATA disk. Study it, and you will see I am right. I've asked it to my
> rackserver-vendor, they say: "that's always the case".

How about just not buying crappy hardware from this lying vendor anymore.
http://ompldr.org/vOHB6Zw/bios4.jpg <- this is present in majority of
motherboard BIOSes since forever.

> But I think I have had systems in the past, what could do it. An
> interesting question is then: how well is it tested?  What when e.g. a
> disk boots, and then gives an I/O error? I am looking for a well-tested
> way to solve this, and I am willing to pay for it or choose another
> hardware vendor for it.

Yes, I think it is conceivable that if a disk fails in a 'bad' way, i.e. by
locking up on reads, or reading the first sector but not the next ones it can
prevent the system from booting even with this priority system. I don't know
if chances of that are high, considering that quite often disks fail by also
ceasing to be detectable in BIOS, in which case your boot-up would proceed
normally.

-- 
With respect,
Roman

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