Re: swapping master & slave HDs: what to change?
SpamHog wrote:
Thank you for your reply, John!
You have just opened to me
vast new expanses of ignorance
I didn't know I possessed.
What do you hope to achieve?
Justice and peace in our time. I also want to themove the current 8GB
master and turn the recently added and thoroughly tested 40GB slave
into master, use it as the "anchor" drive, and keep the bootloader
there. Transient drives will be attracted with an offer of free beer,
snared and put in as slaves for testing, data recovery etc.
Otherwise, I might play with the BIOS boot prority, right? But what
would then happen to partition names? Wouldn't the 40GB switch from
hdb to hda depending on whether a master is there or not? Or is the
jumper-assigned slave status imply hdb no matter what?
If your forty-gig drive is WD, think again. WD drives have two
configurations as master, and it matters that you get it right. The
right setting depends on whether a slave is present, and I've had
systems unbootable because of the wrong location of the jumper. Check
the WD website for details.
This potential problem aside, I like to have my pluggable drives on
their own controller. I figure otherwise I will plug in a master when I
shouldn't or vv.
You won't have a working LILO until _after_ your first successful reboot
whereapon you must run lilo.
Running lilo? Do you mean the bootloader installer OR the bootloader?
It looks like a chicken and egg situation. You probabaly mean that I
have to have the system somehow up and running in the final geometry
BEFORE running lilo will result in the effective installation of the
boot code.
Now I think I remember lilo install runs that failed because my choice
of install target partition and kernel address didn't match the kernel
and disk map files , I guess. But can't I choose / tweak files to
allow for installing wherever I want, and pointing to the kernel I
want? Is it really such a messy proposition?
Lilo is a pig.
After all there are some hints in the manpage switch descriptions:
-P {fix|ignore}
Fix (or ignore) `corrupt' partition tables, i.e.,
partition tables with linear and sector/head/cylin-
der addresses that do not correspond.
-m map-file
Use specified map file instead of the default.
_I_'d replace lilo first,. except I'd not be running it:-)
Uh? What would you _replace_? The lilo package? Why replace it?
grub. Grub is Grand.
Only yesterday I had a fight over this.
hda had Sarge, simply untarred into paritions created on RHL 7.0.
hdb had RHL 7.0.
Booting was done with LILO on hda booting LILO on hdb which then booted RHL.
I _hoped_ - expected even, that I'd not damaged LILO by repartitioning etc.
Not so, it turned out.
So I had an unbootable system.
First effort.
I had _one_ rescue CD to hand - Fedora Core 2's rescue cd. FC2 rescue CD
has a 2.6 kernel on it.
Okay, burn CD (these powerbooks have their uses). Boot CD. Several times
Lilo on RHL won't run, thinks disk is too big. Probably it really
doesn't like the 2.6 kernel, RHL 7.0 has 2.2.
Grub on Sarge won't run. Couldn't figure that one out, looked like libc
compatibility problems but it looks to me that what the rescue CD set up
with environment variables _should_ work. Probably some crucial
difference between FC2 and Sarge.
So back to the server room (with all the Linux boxes except the one I
was operating on) for a boot floppy.
A boot floppy with grub, and nothing else!
With the boot floppy I got a simple commandline where I could type
things like:
root (hd0,0)
kernel /k<tab> <kernel options>
initrd /i<tab>
and boot either one.
The problem with lilo is that it doesn't navigate filesystems. When you
run the lilo command, it constructs lists of sectors to read for each
menu item. When you replace your kernel, lilo needs to be rerun so as to
contruct a new list.
And the contents of that list has to match the view of the disks as seen
by the BIOS, so unplugging a drive _can_ cause grief.
OTOH GRUB navigates filesystems.
Grub is Grand.
Have a rescue CD handy.
A whole box of them!
http://portgeographe.environmentaldisasters.cds.merseine.nu
Nice pics! The end of the world is not that far, after all. Yuckkk!
Four and a half hours after putting that link into my sig, I had my
first visitor. I checked the owner if the IP address with whois.
Guess what. Microsoft!!
Figure that Microsoft is monitoring this list.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au Z1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au
Tourist pics http://portgeographe.environmentaldisasters.cds.merseine.nu/
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