[svlug] 3Ware board + SCSI, non-IDE system, won't boot

[Karsten M. Self]

on Thu, Mar 14, 2002, Drew Bertola (drew at drewb.com) wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 14, 2002 at 12:41:37PM -0800, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> > The box in question is an RH 7.1 server, currently running off of two
> > SCSI disks on an aic7xxx-compatible Adaptec card.  We're trying to add a
> > striped set of disks to the system with a 3Ware board.
> > 
> > When the 3Ware card is in the system, boot stops after checking floppy
> > and CDROM (ATAPI as /dev/hda), unless bootable media are found in one of
> > the two drives.
> > 
> > The BIOS provides for specifying boot order among the floppy and IDE
> > devices, and "other boot devices", but won't allow specification of
> > which, if any, SCSI devices will boot.
> > 
> > The Adaptect SCSI BIOS and 3Ware BIOS have no boot options I'm aware of.
> >
> > 
> > I've tried running LILO to put an MBR on the 3Ware RAID array, and get
> > LILO but stopped at the 'LI' prompt.  I'm leaning toward a boot floppy
> > at present.
> 
> I think the solution I used was to compile one or the other driver
> (aic7xxx or 3wxxx) into the kernel, thus forcing the load order.  This
> isn't the right solution, but it worked.  You can specify the load
> order at boot time, but, IIRC, I had problems with that as well.

Good answer, but wrong problem.  This is coming up before the
_bootloader_ takes over.  It's a BIOS level problem, not a kernel one.

> The box will have the 3ware card ripped out since it didn't provide a
> graceful failure when one of the drives got buggy.

Tell me more.  We just had a four-disk RAID5 array go south (though
functioning degraded).  The replacement disk is seen as an "independent
disk" by the card and can't be added back to the array come hell or high
water.

Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>    http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?       There is no K5 cabal
  http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/         http://www.kuro5hin.org

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