Re: Software raid, booting and bios

[Simon Mcnair <simonmcnair@gmail.com>]

I have not come across a pc which does not allow you to boot a
secondary drive before... Please can you read  the manual and triple
check this ?  The only possible reason I can think this would happen
Is that you're using an add on board and you would configure this from
a secondary bios. My Dell, Asus, and all other motherboards I've had
over the past 10 years all allow a second device.
Cheers
Simon

On 20 May 2011, at 08:15, Paul van der Vlis <paul@vandervlis.nl> wrote:

> Op 20-05-11 09:03, Simon Mcnair schreef:
>> Please can you further define what you mean by 'it can become a
>> problem to boot' ?
>> Generally this is resolved by having a mbr and boot partition on each
>> of your mirrored drives so that whichever you use to boot has the
>> pertinent information to boot the kernel and construct the raid array.
>> If you have raid 5 with 3 disks you'd have a 3 drive mirror partition
>> on each disk and a raid 5 set across all three too.
>
> In the bios from my machines (Supermicro, Dell) I can select only one
> drive to boot. Wenn the drive fails, no other disk is tried.
>
> I can go into the bios and change the drive when it fails, or I can
> exchange the disks. But I would like it, when the machine would simple
> boot even when the first disk is corrupt.
>
> With regards,
> Paul van der Vlis.
>
>
>> I'm not a guru on this and can't provide much knowledge past the
>> theory and high level ;-)
>> Simon
>>
>> On 20 May 2011, at 07:55, Paul van der Vlis <paul@vandervlis.nl> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I use software raid (mdadm). The main problem for me is that when the
>>> drive with the MBR fails, it can become a problem to boot.
>>>
>>> When the bios would use another drive to boot when the first drive
>>> failes, this problem would be gone. But I don't know rackservers who do
>>> that. Do you?
>>>
>>> Or is there maybe some kind of fake-raid card what uses mdadm to solve
>>> this problem?
>>>
>>> Another way would be to use e.g. an USB device to boot to solve this
>>> problem. Any experiences with that?
>>>
>>> (hmm, I realize that netboot is an option too).
>>>
>>> With regards,
>>> Paul van der Vlis.
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> http://www.vandervlis.nl
>>>
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>
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