(OT) Worst night ever. WAS Adding a ide drive to an all scsi computer
Dear all, Thank you for the advise on adding the ide drive to my computer. I could not get the ide drive to even recognize. After some monkey-ing around, I decided to pull all the drives out of my computer and add 5 brand new 36GB 10,000 RPM 80pin SCSI drives to my computer. I printed out the Software RAID How-to, ordered a pizza, bought 4 cans of Mountain Dew from the soda machine, and went to work... That was 2.5 hours ago. Now here I am writing to you. You see I could go home and tell my wife all that had happened but she would be half asleep and just stare blankly. Even awake she could not begin to sympathize with me, or even understand in the least what I am talking about. This is where you all come in. Tonight, you will unwillingly lend me a sympathetic ear. Now where was I? Oh yes, my new hard disks. About a month ago my boss decided to order 10-15 (I lost count) of these hard drives. He did not read the fine print and accidentally ordered 80pin hot swap drives. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade right? I happened to have 5 80 pin to 68/50 pin SCSI converters lying around in the back and used those to connect these hard disks to my back-plane-less computer. Geocentric (my beloved Debian box) is a IBM Z-Pro with a Xeon 1Ghz (I could add a second processor), 1.5GB of RAM, a dual head video card, etc; all housed in a 50,000lb case. Way too much for what I use it for, but nice none-the-less. I haven't turned this computer off in months. Stable as can be, even though I was running SID. Btw, thanks to all Debian project people out there, I am constantly amazed at how functional even the 'unstable' tree is! I think I'll get Debian 4 Life tattooed on me somewhere... Ok, I'm loosing focus. Geocentric has 6 or 7 slots that you can add drives to on these little rails that come with the case. It took about an hour to figure out how to insert all of those drives in such a way that they would all fit. But, I did it! I then had to somehow cable these together, with the one cable I had to daisy chain them all together. It was impossible. In a moment of ah-ha I carefully removed two of the pressed on connectors to the ribbon cables, and then just as carefully pressed them back on with the help of a vice and a micrometer. With my newly customized cable I went back to work. After some twisting to get the connectors oriented correctly with the SCA - 68pin adapter, they all snapped in perfectly. I would like to take a moment to add out of the 5 converters I had, I had three different brands, mismatched throughout the chain. Finally getting the computer assembled I plugged it in... A smile on my face... A 1 INCH SPARK ARCED FROM ONE OF THE CONVERTERS... Then... My main board started to smoke. I unplugged my computer... Put it on a cart and wheeled it to the back room. I'm going to sleep now... tomorrows another day... Michael -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Adding a ide drive to an all scsi computer
On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Michael Kahle wrote:
I am currently running Debian Sid on my computer. I have 3 SCSI drives in
it and I would like to add a fourth IDE drive to it. I have a 80 GB drive
that would be a great chunk-o-diskTM for me to store all kinds of goodies
on. I originally built the system with one SCSI drive and later added the
two others. This worked great for me! But here's my problem. I have heard
that by adding a IDE drive into the system I will no longer be able to boot
off of my SCSI drive. Is that true? I guess there is some BIOS issue with
that.
Well, I can't speak for others but I've been doing this for more than a
year now without any problem at all (that should give you some hope of
success `;-). The only thing you need is a BIOS that will allow you to
set the boot priority of SCSI higher than IDE. Of course you will need
to adjust lilo or grub and fstab too. I had some trouble with lilo before
I learned to use the bios option, but that might not be the case for you.
Just in case it is useful to you, here's a copy of the relevant part of
my /etc/lilo.conf:
# Overrides the default mapping between harddisk names and the BIOS'
# harddisk order. Use with caution.
disk=/dev/hde
bios=0x81
disk=/dev/sda
bios=0x80
# Specifies the boot device. This is where Lilo installs its boot
# block. It can be either a partition, or the raw device, in which
# case it installs in the MBR, and will overwrite the current MBR.
#
boot=/dev/sda
# Specifies the device that should be mounted as root. (`/')
#
root=/dev/sda5
To add to the complexity of this, the drive has about 50 GB of data
that I want to keep... Oh, and it is formatted NTFS (Windows 2000). Can I
add this IDE drive 'as is' without re-formatting it? I seem to remember
seeing that I could mount a NTFS file system somewhere.
Add something like this to your /etc/fstab:
/dev/sdax /win ntfs defaults,ro,user,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
Adjust the device, mountpoint and userid to your situation. This will
allow you to use that partition as a normal user. If you prefer to mount
it yourself add the noauto option.
Others will probably warn you against using it (that happens almost every
time someone mentions it) and they are right to let you know this isn't
a risk-free affair. On the other hand I have been using NTFS in read-only
mode for years now ('til recently on a daily basis) and have NEVER had
any trouble with it. So, don't let those warnings scare you off. Do heed
them however when it comes to using write-mode: I won't dare to without a
current and verified backup of that partition.
HTH
Grx HdV
--
Support bacteria -
they're the only culture some people have.
J.A. de Vries aka HdV
Delft University of Technology
Computing Centre
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Adding a ide drive to an all scsi computer
Greetings, I hope you all can help me resolve my problem. I am currently running Debian Sid on my computer. I have 3 SCSI drives in it and I would like to add a fourth IDE drive to it. I have a 80 GB drive that would be a great chunk-o-diskTM for me to store all kinds of goodies on. I originally built the system with one SCSI drive and later added the two others. This worked great for me! But here's my problem. I have heard that by adding a IDE drive into the system I will no longer be able to boot off of my SCSI drive. Is that true? I guess there is some BIOS issue with that. To add to the complexity of this, the drive has about 50 GB of data that I want to keep... Oh, and it is formatted NTFS (Windows 2000). Can I add this IDE drive 'as is' without re-formatting it? I seem to remember seeing that I could mount a NTFS file system somewhere. If you need more information, no problem. Thanks so much, Michael -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Adding a ide drive to an all scsi computer
Michael Kahle said: e two others. This worked great for me! But here's my problem. I have heard that by adding a IDE drive into the system I will no longer be able to boot off of my SCSI drive. Is that true? I guess there is some BIOS depends on the system. in many cases yes it's true, in some it is not. your best bet is to just plug it in 'as-is', be sure your BIOS is set to boot from the SCSI device first and see if it works. if it does, great, if not then you will probably want to boot from floppy, and install a boot loader either grub or lilo into the MBR of the IDE disk for booting(this won't affect the partitions on the IDE disk). you can mount NTFS filesystems on linux though I personally would not except in an emergency, the driver for NTFS has a long history of causing damage to NTFS filesystems though recently I've read it's gotten better. nate -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Adding a ide drive to an all scsi computer
On Wed, 2003-01-08 at 23:50, Michael Kahle wrote: Greetings, I hope you all can help me resolve my problem. I am currently running Debian Sid on my computer. I have 3 SCSI drives in it and I would like to add a fourth IDE drive to it. I have a 80 GB drive that would be a great chunk-o-diskTM for me to store all kinds of goodies on. I originally built the system with one SCSI drive and later added the two others. This worked great for me! But here's my problem. I have heard that by adding a IDE drive into the system I will no longer be able to boot off of my SCSI drive. Is that true? I guess there is some BIOS issue with Depends on your bios really. My bios gives me the option of booting off a scsi card, but I have seen one or two that dont give that option. Im sure yours does since your already booting off of it. Just make sure you set your boot order correctly. that. To add to the complexity of this, the drive has about 50 GB of data that I want to keep... Oh, and it is formatted NTFS (Windows 2000). Can I add this IDE drive 'as is' without re-formatting it? I seem to remember seeing that I could mount a NTFS file system somewhere. This would be the problem. The kernel does have NTFS support. The read is marked experimental and the write is marked dangerous(from what I remember). Basically reading off of said drive is a bit touchy but can be done, but you should not write to drives containing data you even remotely care about. Now I have never used this, so this is just the impression I get from what Ive read about the subject. But then again maybe read the data off onto another disk(compressing it along the way to save space) then reformat ext3 and write the data back. That would be what I would do. -- Scott Henson [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Adding a ide drive to an all scsi computer
On Wednesday 08 January 2003 07:50 pm, Michael Kahle wrote: Greetings, I hope you all can help me resolve my problem. I am currently running Debian Sid on my computer. I have 3 SCSI drives in it and I would like to add a fourth IDE drive to it. I have a 80 GB drive that would be a great chunk-o-diskTM for me to store all kinds of goodies on. I originally built the system with one SCSI drive and later added the two others. This worked great for me! But here's my problem. I have heard that by adding a IDE drive into the system I will no longer be able to boot off of my SCSI drive. Is that true? I guess there is some BIOS issue with that. To add to the complexity of this, the drive has about 50 GB of data that I want to keep... Oh, and it is formatted NTFS (Windows 2000). Can I add this IDE drive 'as is' without re-formatting it? I seem to remember seeing that I could mount a NTFS file system somewhere. If you need more information, no problem. Thanks so much, Michael Drives are mounted from entries in '/etc/fstab'. If you don't add an entry before booting with the new drive nothing will happen to the drive when you first boot. The problem is ntfs is not a well supported file system for read/writes from Linux. I would back up the data somewhere, reformat the disk then restore the data to the hd. As far as booting IDE or SCSi there are differences in bios's. Some offer a choice between IDE or SCSI and some will boot the master drive on the primary IDE controller no matter what. You can test your box, you can always mount the IDE drive as a slave to avoid the issue. -- Greg Madden -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
