Quote:
Originally Posted by pdxspork
I purchased one of ... these ... FileMate Express Card SSDs with the intention of installing my operating system of choice on it.
Come to find out my laptop's BIOS (Dell Precision m4400) does not support booting off express cards, making my life a bit more difficult.
I have grub installed on the 2.5" sata drive in the laptop however attempting to boot off anything on the Express Card SSD I get a Error: 21, selected drive does not exist.
Using the supergrub boot disk to list drives grub can see shows my sata drive and cd drive, not the SSD.
I realize that booting directly off a drive that the bios does not recognize as bootable isn't possible, however shouldn't I be able to chainload to my SSD if I can find a bootloader that can recognize it?
Thanks.
|
Saw this in a Google search and so created an account just to give you an answer.
The problem is probably not Grub, but that you don't have RAID stuffs compiled into your kernel. Most SSDs, including these, use RAID controllers. Recompile your kernel with RAID 0 included and try again and you'll see the drive okay.
Also, these particular SSDs _should_ boot on newer laptops. I say these particular SSDs because they use the PCI-e bus, not the USB bus.
You can tell the difference in the product ID: Those having a "D" use the PCI-E bus and have much higher read/write than the USB 2.0 drives, which have a "U" in the product ID. So, both the Filemate 3FMS4D24M-WR (24 GB model) and the Filemate 3FMS4D48M-WR (48 GB model) use the PCI-e bus.
I've been looking at these drives myself, getting some education and doing some planning -- I really do want!
Had to edit out the URL from my quoted reply, sorry.
Also, your distribution may already have a RAID module built for you to use, but remember that for the module to be used correctly on boot, it needs to be made available very early in the boot process. This means you'll need to add the module to the initrd which is loaded into RAM upon boot.
