Re: Software raid, booting and bios

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 [off-list ref] wrote:

Op 20-05-11 09:03, Simon Mcnair schreef:

quoted

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.

quoted

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 [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

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.


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