Alternative booting

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sat Aug 18 20:25:05 UTC 2007


Karl Larsen wrote:

>>> Also, I do not have plain simple IDE drives, but a RAID array on the 
>>> nVidia SATA controller that I want to use to boot from. In that case, 
>>> when I specify a hdx device it will write the boot loader to only one 
>>> of the drives of the mirror array, which doesn't do any good.
>>
>> If bios sees the drives as separate things, then that's how you have 
>> to install grub, since it has to call bios to load the kernel.  On a 
>> real hardware raid, bios will only see the array.
>>
>    Les you have bios on the brain. My 1994 bios works fine with 2007 
> hard drives. You are trying to protect the grub people I think. It isn't 
> grub but it could be a kernel problem. I might boot to my old kernel and 
> see....

Until the kernel and initrd are loaded, bios is the only way you can 
access the drive all grub does is make bios calls to get sectors. You 
can't have a kernel problem until the kernel is loaded, at which point 
the error will be something about not being able to mount the root 
partition.  Grub is a bit strange in that it doesn't use the linux names 
for the devices and partitions and you might be confused by the 
symlinked location of grub.conf if you have a separate /boot partition, 
but otherwise it pretty much does what it is told to do.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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