[sclug] CF IDE Booting

[Matt]

* Peter Brewer <p.w.brewer at reading.ac.uk> [2005-09-13 14:22:52]:
> We bought several CF IDE adapters 
> (http://linitx.com/product_info.php?cPath=39&products_id=448) hoping to 
> use them to boot our servers - unfortunately we are having some problems.
> 
> What we are trying to build is a system with the CF containing "/boot" 
> and a collection of SATA HD's in a series of RAID5's containing 
> everything else.  The reason being that you can't boot from RAID5 (as 
> far as I understand?) and we wanted an easily changeable 'disk' to hold 
> the boot info.

Software RAID5 presumably? You can boot from a hardware RAID5 no
problem, but I think Linux only supports booting from a RAID1 mirror.

> We have tried installing Ubuntu, Debian and Suse and none of them manage 
> to setup /boot on the CF successfully.  Ubuntu and Debian both report 
> the following error when the partitioner tries to write to the CF:
> 
> "Input/Output error during read on..."

No idea, full context and error might be helpful.

> Suse on the other hand gets all the way through phase 1 of the installer 
> but when it reboots for phase 2 GRUB throws an error.

Is the order the BIOS and kernel sees all of your disks different? If
Linux sees your IDE interfaces first, then the SATA interfaces, whereas
the BIOS see them in reverse, that usually causes problems with most
bootloaders, common with having a mix of IDE and SCSI controllers.

Again, the actual error might be helpful.

Matt
-- 
"I put the 'b' in subtle."
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