[NTLUG:Discuss] Promise Bootstrap stuff

[Daniel Hauck]

You should try to avoid warnings and errors.  Clearly your BIOS is set to
boot from SCSI or sees the Promise controller drive(s) as the primary.

Interestingly, I'm in the (slow) process of building a virtually identical
machine.  (In this case, a P2-300 with BX chipset but a similar Promise
controller)  I will be using the promise RAID controller to chain 2
20GB/7200/UATA100 drives together as a 40GB drive.  It will replace another
machine as my NT/SaMBa domain controller.  Otherwise we're similar enough to
share notes.

I'll be installing RedHat 7.3 on this box.  Should be interesting.

Anyway, back to the original message -- Check your BIOS settings for boot
order.  Also, if your Promise controller has any BIOS settings, see what you
can do to override that.  Additionally, use an FDISK utility to toggle the
bootable flag off.  You want to run a clean and clear LILO.  When you go to
update the Kernel, you will need to resolve this problem I think.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Aaron Goldblatt" <lists-ntlug at goldblatt.net>
To: <discuss at ntlug.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 01, 2002 17:22
Subject: [NTLUG:Discuss] Promise Bootstrap stuff


> I just bought a Promise IDE controller (Ultra100TX2) to put into my Big
> Server Box (an AMD K6-2/350 with 256 megs of RAM, w00h00!) in an effort
> to do away with one of my machines, and thus have less to administer
> (and fewer points of failure).
>
> The short version is that it worked but it's funky.
>
> I now have four hard drives and two CD drives (one RW, one ROM) in this
> machine.  The Promise controller offers two IDE channels; the on-board
> Via chipset offers the other two.
>
> It looks like this:
>
> ide0 Promise 0
> ide1 Promise 1
> ide2 Via 0
> ide3 Via 1
>
> ide0 hda
> ide1 hdc hdd
> ide2 hde
> ide3 hdg hdh (cd drives here)
>
> It works okay.  It even boots properly, and it's running.  I'm happy.
>
> But I noticed a quirk.  Orignally, hde came from a bootable Linux box,
> so it's still got boot block on it.  hda was this machine's boot drive
> before the changes, so it's got a boot block on it.
>
> I can tell from the way it boots (watching the startup scripts) but also
> by observing the differences in Lilo that the system is bootstrapping
> from hde, which is then booting the kernel on hda.
>
> It works; Lilo is happy except that it gripes about a drive geometry
> problem when I rerun lilo.  It successfully executes and the changes I
> made to lilo.conf are reflected on the next boot.
>
> The kernel, if it makes any difference, is 2.4.18-pre9.
>
> My question is:  Since it seems to work, and I'm planning on this being
> a pretty stable configuration for the time being, should I worry about
> getting it to bootstrap from hda, or should I leave it alone?
>
> ag
>
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