Using GRUB to boot from an pci sata raid card
 

Hi,

I'm in a bit of a pickle. I have a DL380 G3 HP server and I need to attach a 1TB hard drive. Of course the server only accepts SCSI and since I don't have a few thousand pounds to splash about I am looking at alternate methods.

What I have done so far is buy a PCI SATA raid card and attach the 1TB drive to it. The BIOS seemed to be playing nice detecting it and allowing me to select the card. But it won’t see the drive.

Funnily enough though when I installed Linux on the SCSI drive during the install it saw the 1TB just fine and I could write to it. This has led me to believe that I could use GRUB (installed on the SCSI) to boot the 1TB as the hardware setup is working but the BIOS just can't handle it.

So here I am with no real knowledge of GRUB. I was hoping someone could tell me where to begin with this and if it is even possible.

Oh and the server doesn’t have the option to boot from USB

Thanks for reading this far.

Alex

PCI sata card may show drives as scsi in bios. I doubt it would be under hard drives as such but you have to kind of figure out how the bios knows about the drive. Searching for boot device may include a pci or scci slot then the drive.

Grub2 ought to or should be able to find any bootable if it supports that pci add on.


Older bios's were odd about add on cards. That system ought to allow it.

Belive me I have looked and fiddled. Some people have done it with my setup but with a different card, unfortunately they did not post there card model. It looks like the BIOS will only work with some RAID chipsets.

When installing Ubuntu server onto the SCSI yesterday the installer yet again picked up the 1TB and it was given the designation (0,0) the SCSI was given (-.0) I take it thats what I will use in the GRUB config.

I guess some bios's did have an update that describes add on bootable cards maybe??

Be sure you start with a complete power off and remove ac then press power button a few times to be sure it is a cold boot.

But the OS and booting are two different deals.

Might have to recompile grub to use the controller.

If you want you can easily get plop (slitaz, smart boot manager) to boot to a usb.