Re: Booting from SCSI when there is IDE

[brian moore <bem@cmc.net>]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 12:03:33PM +0100, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 March 2001 11:51, Norman Schmidt wrote:
> > Hi Russell!
> >
> > I have three VIA KT-based Duron servers.
> > One of them has an Adaptec 29160 card wirh an external IDE-to-SCSI (that
> > means the three 40 GB drives are IDE, but it behaves as if it were a 80
> > GB (Raid 5) SCSI harddisk) RAID attached to it and two internal IDE
> > drives (each 20 GB).
> >
> > When we first installed Debian  (2.2r0), we did this into a /boot and a
> > / partition on the SCSI drive, while the two internal drives were
> > attached (each as master on ide 0 and 1).
> >
> > First, it wouldn´t boot, but the lilo.conf manualpage and an old SUSE
> > handbook told us, that we had to remap the drives.
> >
> > Here is what we entered into lilo.conf:
> >
> > disk = /dev/sda
> >   bios = 0x80
> > disk = /dev/hda
> >   bios = 0x81
> > disk = /dev/hdc
> >   bios = 0x82
> 
> Same as before then.
>
> What version(s) of LILO have you tried and had this result with?

I've been doing the above for the past couple years with no problem.
It's not really a bug in LILO, but a misfeature of the brain dead way
that the PC BIOS works.

LILO has no way of knowing what the order of the drives is according to
the BIOS.  It -assumes- that the BIOS will make the IDE drives appear
first and then the SCSI, but in cases like mine where the BIOS doesn't
even know about the IDE drives, it has to be kicked.  Maybe if I told
the BIOS to look for IDE stuff, it would have a different order... but
what I have works and I've seen enough '01010101' stuff on my screen for
a long time. :)

Perhaps add it to the docs for LILO so that others can find it (I had
people on #debian insist that my solution wouldn't work, even though I've
used it happily), but classifying goofy PC hardware compatibility crap
as a bug would mean all sorts of things were bugs.   (You really don't
want to know the games I have to play in order to boot a CD with a SCSI
CD drive....  see, the SCSI BIOS has to be told to boot a floppy first
since the 'El Torito' thing is a hack into the floppy boot.... and
the 'real' BIOS has to be told to boot SCSI first...) 

Gads, PC's suck.... if it wasn't for Linux, they'd be useless. :)

-- 
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