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 () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments _______________________________________________ Scottish mailing list Scottish@mailman.lug.org.uk https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/scottish