[NMLUG] another boot issue

[ebrown at lanl.gov (Ed Brown)]

On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 12:26, Gary Sandine wrote:
> I hope I didn't miss you saying your SCSI card BIOS does not support
> this (I can't imagine it doesn't, either)

Seems that it isn't possible to choose which SCSI channel to boot from,
or boot from first rather... In the Adaptec SCSI BIOS, you first choose
which controller, A or B, to configure.  Then, in either "Boot Device
Configuration" subsection, it only says:

Single Image.
Master SCSI Controller AIC-7902 A at slot...

with no opportunity to select or change anything there.

I looked at Paul's suggestions for changing the IRQ or I/O port
assignments.  They both use IRQ 9, but have different I/O port
assignments, but the BIOS only lets you change those things for the
serial ports, and it's too late to try to do anything with them from
within linux.  (Thanks for those details by the way, I also wondered
about the origins of drive assignments in linux.)

Also experimented more with Michael's suggestions about installing a
bootloader in the MBR on the raid array 'disk'.  Another effort to
install grub, this time using the "native-install" method, using a grub
floppy, but it still isn't finding the menu, though I can boot from the
grub prompt by manually entering the parameters.  Ran into problems with
the "chainloader" idea too: couldn't figure out how to install that way,
also foresaw a problem with that in terms of the grub.conf file... could
explain more later.

The good news maybe is that I haven't made things any worse, always a
possibility when messing with bootloaders and such...

thanks for the suggestions!
-Ed