[Scottish] Hardware question?

[rayH at engineering-intelligence.net]

On Friday 07 August 2009 16:37:12 Julian Gibson wrote:
> The 670 has 2 SATA connectors on the mobo as well as well as the
> onboard SCSI.

According to:
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ws670/en/ug_en/

Your box has 3x3.5in bays and 3x5.25in bays.  So if you don't need 3 
optical drives you could use a pair or 3.5-5.25in brackets to fit 2 SATA 
drives while retaining both SCSIs.   If you are willing to forego ECC 
memory you can also get fit 8GiB RAM for a reasonable price (c.£50).

I am pretty sure that any BIOS that supports SATA will let you choose an 
arbitrary hdd boot order.  The above manual says that the on-board RAID 
is OS independent, but it looks like the management software is 
MS-Windows only so you might have use that to disable any existing 
configuration.  You might also investigate upgrading the BIOSes.

I use mostly openSuSE.  My experimental machine has a pair of primary SATA 
drives configured with a boot partition  (mirrored -- /dev/mt0) and the 
other partitions (swap, /, and /home) striped (/dev/mt1-3).  Backup 
partition is on a third drive.

The drawback with / on  /dev/mt1 is that I cannot update from a DVD.  The 
openSuSE install/update process can create a RAID partition but cannot 
recognise an installed root partition on one.  This has not been of any 
great consequence as with a working system I just loop mount the iso 
image and "zypper dup".  

Once you have any /dev/mtNs installed fdisk will warn that they do not 
have a valid partition table.  Opening them with fdisk and then 
hitting "w" will fix that.  I don't know if there is a problem using a 
rescue boot to fix  a screwed configuration without "fixing" the 
partition table, because I have been habitually "fixing" it for years, 
and have never remembered to test it first.



-- 
  ray

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