Re: [gentoo-amd64] OS setting in BIOS
On Sunday 25 May 2008 17:02:07 Mike Doty wrote: Peter Humphrey wrote: | I was poking around in my BIOS this morning and rediscovered a setting | to define the installed OS. I'd wondered about it some time ago and | then forgotten about it. | | I can set the BIOS setting OS Installation to Other or to 64bit Linux | 2.6.9. I have it set to Other at the moment. My questions are: what effect | this setting is likely to have, and whether it's really specific to the | version. | | This is a Supermicro H8DCE motherboard with dual Opteron 246s and 4GB RAM in | four banks, two connected to each CPU. | | I've tried Google but found nothing. Supermicro would be able to tell you. It most likely affects boot order and/or ACPI tables/features. Well, I tried it to see. At the next boot, one of the two drives in software RAID-1 had two faulty partitions, and the whole physical disk seemed to be the cause of numerous long timeouts and resulting failure messages during boot. So I've put it back :-) The problem could equally have been due to a dodgy disk, or even the SATA interface on the motherboard. I'll have to keep an eye on it. Sometimes an experiment results in a lot of work - in this case, multi-GB of backup and restore, and I've still to found out why the rescue system, which is on an ordinary IDE disk, won't boot. Too many coincidences for my liking. -- Rgds Peter -- gentoo-amd64@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-amd64] OT - Which is better CF or thumb drive?
Hi, So far I have building servers for internal use, using Compact Flash on IDE connector. Using ext3 file system. Only about a year of use. So far it is great. Just got a simple cheap Dell tower server with AMD opteron chip. The motherboard has no IDE connector. I think more and more motherboards are coming with only SATA connectors. The good thing is that the motherboard has a internal usb connector. That means that a 4Gb thumb drive can be connected onto the motherboard internally. Now I have a choice of getting a SATA to CF adaptor or just a thumb drive. Which way should I go? Thumb Drive or CF? Second problem. I loved using CF on IDE because of the the drive is called hda instead of sda. This way it is very easy to call on the hda to boot up without confusing with the data drives on the SATA. Need to find a way to fix the naming of the drives regardless of how many drives are connected. I always had the problem of the names of drives changing when one of the drives is removed and then rebooted. It will try to boot up from the wrong drive. If anyone knows of the solution, please share. P.V.Anthony -- gentoo-amd64@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-amd64] OT - Which is better CF or thumb drive?
On Wed, 28 May 2008 01:14:01 +0800 P.V.Anthony [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, So far I have building servers for internal use, using Compact Flash on IDE connector. Using ext3 file system. Only about a year of use. So far it is great. Ext3? You know that journalling will cause additional wear? I'd use Ext2 but it might depend on your use-cases which will happen more frequently: data loss through worn-out flash memory or data loss through corrupted filesystems after a crash. Just got a simple cheap Dell tower server with AMD opteron chip. The motherboard has no IDE connector. I think more and more motherboards are coming with only SATA connectors. The good thing is that the motherboard has a internal usb connector. That means that a 4Gb thumb drive can be connected onto the motherboard internally. Now I have a choice of getting a SATA to CF adaptor or just a thumb drive. Which way should I go? Thumb Drive or CF? Hmm, I found thumb drives to be cheaper than CF and faster as long as you don't use those really expensive CFs which support DMA. On the other hand, if you use those DMA-enabled CFs, you might get a better transfer rate and less CPU-utilization because USB relies on the CPU for many actions (afaik). I've never tried it, though. Second problem. I loved using CF on IDE because of the the drive is called hda instead of sda. This way it is very easy to call on the hda to boot up without confusing with the data drives on the SATA. Need to find a way to fix the naming of the drives regardless of how many drives are connected. I always had the problem of the names of drives changing when one of the drives is removed and then rebooted. It will try to boot up from the wrong drive. If anyone knows of the solution, please share. There was a topic boot Gentoo from USB key on this list, recently (started on 08/04/30). You can look into it at gmane.org. Basic idea was to use an initramfs-script to determine the root-partition by its UID. BTW: UIDs and/or volume labels are the way to go if you want to avoid problems with changing device names. Hope this helps Florian Philipp signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-amd64] OT - Which is better CF or thumb drive?
Florian Philipp wrote: BTW: UIDs and/or volume labels are the way to go if you want to avoid problems with changing device names. This won't help you much with booting but for any other partitions you can always use /dev/disk/by-uuid/ or one of the other directories under /dev/disk to help uniquely identify disks. Another trick I've used that works really well is to use LVM (assuming you don't use the removable drive with other operating systems). LVM can figure out which device is which by label - ditto for software raid. For booting I think your only option would be some kind of initrd as already suggested, or the equivalent in linuxBIOS if you're really daring - unless you can predict how drives get identified on each boot. You might be able to do something tricky like putting a small mirrored boot partition on each drive so that it doesn't matter which one boots (I already do that with two drives just for redundancy, but I guess if you're clever you might be able to extend this). I'm not sure how far you'd get with that with more than two drives - I don't think mda supports more than 2-drive mirrors, and grub can't handle anything other than simple mirroring). -- gentoo-amd64@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
