Re: LILO

[Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au>]

On Friday 11 May 2001 00:09, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> I am not savvy on all the glorious details, but I can't find anything in
> the LILO doc about BIOS-less SCSI cards.  About RAID: Ditto, I can't find
> any special support for RAID disks.  May be very well that GRUB lacks
> support for RAID filesystems (so you'd have to keep the kernel on a plain
> filesystem), but it certain;y has support for block lists, so if LILO boots
> from RAID fs by blocklist (what I'd suspect from what I know about it), so
> can GRUB (there is probably no automatic way to do that, but it would be
> simple to add).

The current LILO will install boot blocks on both hard drives of a RAID-1 
independantly.  This means that if one dies the other can be booted.

However this only works if the BIOS detects the first hard drive as still 
being present (it's not electrically dead) and allows booting from a 
secondary drive.  Having a failed system meet these criteria seems unlikely 
to me.

The new LILO (now in beta) will put the same boot block on both disks with 
the BIOS address of the primary disk being used.

If you make a RAID-1 /dev/md1 be composed of /dev/hda1 and /dev/hdc1 then you 
should  be able to have GRUB configured to boot from /dev/hda1 with no 
knowledge of RAID and have it work.  Never tried it though.

As for RAID-0 or RAID-5, currently nothing allows you to boot from them.

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