SATA Drive for /boot & /root

Misterfixit · 06-18-2006, 09:26 AM

I just completed building a "Maximum PC Magazine" box. It has a 10,000 rpm 36GB SATA drive and two 200 GB IDE Hard drives plus a Plexor DVD.

Problem is this, I installed FC5, but the system never sees the SATA drive (/dev/sda1) first so as to load the system.

My plan was to run the system from the 10,000rpm drive and use the two slower but bigger drives as a RAID storage for /home

Recommendations?

System is an 3200 AMD-64 with an MSI mobo, 4GB of memory and running at 3.2 Ghz.

Thanks for the advice!

Cheers,

Dave

www.myspace.com/cwo4mann

kinghai · 06-18-2006, 10:55 AM

Make sure your mobo BIOS select boot from SATA first. What model of your mobo?

I'm a little lazy to check my BIOS, but I remember something about I select "Boot from other devices\From SATA", for my mobo, ABIT AV8.

Misterfixit · 06-18-2006, 03:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kinghai

Make sure your mobo BIOS select boot from SATA first. What model of your mobo?

I'm a little lazy to check my BIOS, but I remember something about I select "Boot from other devices\From SATA", for my mobo, ABIT AV8.

Cha Ong Kinghai! I checked the BiOS setting and made sure that it is set to "see" the SATA drive first. This does not seem to make a difference to Linux -- Linux still does not find the /boot section which I installed on the SATA drive during the installation.

Where do you live in Vn?

Regards,

Dave

kinghai · 06-19-2006, 07:10 AM

I'm living in Ho Chi Minh City

.

I guess you are using a Raptor, and you overclocked your CPU from 2000 Mhz to 3200 Mhz, wow

, you are a pro-overclocker.

I don't know much about RAID, so I can't help you so much

. Can you try to boot your FC5 with "acpi=off" to see what happen?

(I post instruction, in case you don't know hot to set it off)

Code:

1. Boot your system, at GRUB menu, point to your Fedora line, press E (Edit)
2. Select the 2nd line, press E again, add acpi=off at the end. Enter
3. Press B (Boot) to boot with ACPI off

Another way, I think, install GRUB again could fix this problem.

ramram29 · 06-23-2006, 02:29 PM

It seems like you have your hard disks mixed. Remove the IDE disks and try to boot just with the SATA disk. Else reinstall just with the SATA disk to make sure that it comes up. Afterward then connect the IDE disks again and see what happens. Go through the "Process of Elimination" first.

Electro · 06-23-2006, 03:36 PM

You need to make sure sata-via and libata is included in the initrd file. A utility to help you make an initrd file is mkinitrd.

I suggest using Linux software RAID. I recommend using RAID-10 for /home and file storage because RAID-0 doubles your chances of a hard drive crash. Though you could use RAID-1 but you will get 200 GB instead about 400 GB.

RAID-0: Stripping
Increases read and write throughput or bandwidth. Accessing time stays the same. n the chances a hard drive failing.

RAID-1: Mirroring
Accessing time cuts in half only when reading. Writting is the same throughput as one drive. Redundancy.

RAID-10: Stripping + Mirroring
Accessing time cuts in half only when reading. Read and Write throughput is increased. Is it possible that two adjacent hard drives can fail if all hard drives in the array are the same model, brand, and capacity. Redundancy.