Re: Linux not adhering to BIOS Drive boot order?

[Tim Fletcher]

> > I have a mirrored boot drive in a pair of firewalls / routers and to test
> > before I put them into service I pulled hda and the machine booted fine
> > from hdc and baring winging about the missing disk (all the drives are
> > mirrored) carried on as normal. A fresh disk was put and rebuilt no
> > problems and was then booted off with the other disk missing.
>
> Ahh.  What I was missing was that by specifying /dev/md0 as the root device,
> not only do you get an identical map for the kernels, but the root device
> remains /dev/md0 no matter which drive fails and LILO/kernel don't need to
> do anything special to find it.  This assumes the BIOS can boot from /dev/hdc
> to start with (i.e. /dev/hda is totally gone).

Hence I have the disks in caddies to make taking them out all together
easier, to force the bios to find the /dev/hdc as the boot drive

> How does MD/RAID0 know which array should be /dev/md0?  What if you had a
> second array on /dev/hdb and /dev/hdd, would that become /dev/md0 (assuming
> it had a kernel/boot sector)?

/etc/raidtab specifies which drives belong in which array, but I only have
hda and hdc so I can't really answer the question

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