[sclug] Debian Squeeze boot up messages: moving on.

[Neil Haughton]

>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Debian Squeeze boot up messages - should I be worried?
>       (Neil Haughton)
>    2. Re: Debian Squeeze boot up messages - should I be worried?
>       (Dickon Hood)
>    3. Re: Debian Squeeze boot up messages - should I be worried?
>       (Oliver Gorwits)
>
>


Okay, I've rescued my data from the dodgy disk onto another disk, so I'm
going to bite the bullter and install a SSD for OS/apps and a twin mirrored
RAID for my data. That's my summer holiday up in smoke and I'll have to buy
Her a new frock, but ce la vie. :-)

I'm stepping out of my comfort zone now, but here are the challenges and
potential pitfalls as I see them:

1. I only have PCI slots and IDE sockets (no PCI-E or SATA) on my
ancient-yet-stalwart motherboard. Reasonably Priced Disks these days tend
to be SATAII or better, and for a PCI slot it seems I can only get SATA
adapters, not SATAII.

2. I already have a relatively new 320Gb SATA drive in a caddy that I
currently used through USB for my data. I would like this to be one half of
the mirrored RAID, for obvious reasons.

Questions:

(a) So if I acquire a PCI/SATA adapter with three or more SATA sockets, and
plug a new SATAII drive plus my 'old' SATA drive into it, using software
RAID to manage them, can I expect any obvious problems? (I'm using Debian
Squeeze, remember.) I understand that unless I am lucky enough to find a
similarly sized drive, I will lose capacity on the larger of the two (ie
the new one), but that doesn't particularly bother me.

I guess this boils down to mixing SATA and SATAII drives in a RAID (I
accept that the SATAII drive will probably fall back to SATA, but that's
streets ahead of my current mostly IDE setup so I'm happy with that), and
similarly using a SATAII SSD in a SATA socket.

Any data I wish to retrieve from my old IDE disks I will copy across to the
new devices, in the time honoured fashion before I physically remove them.

(b) If I acquire a 128MB SATAII SSD and plug that into the adapter, can I
expect any problems? I intend to install a fresh Debian Squeeze onto it,
and have everything except /var and /home there (/home will be on the RAID,
/var will probably be on a single IDE drive that I will retain, or maybe on
the RAID too, to save a bit of juice).

Folks, waddaya think? Am I looking for trouble?

Lastly, on the matter of SATA adapters, does price count? They seem to
range from under ?10 to ?50 for what looks more or less like the same
thing. Are there any such offerings that you folks know I must avoid, eg
only work with Windows?

TIA

Neil.