Possible to set Boot Controller Order (Proliant) from Linux Command Line?

[Lucifer Megacruel]

Hi Alzhy,

At the risk of going off topic , but answering your question here.

>>Surely there is a way to change whatever >>BIOS settings from the OS - Linux or >>WIndows. Or is there ?

Short answer: possible , but very difficult unless you know the particular hardware very well :( . The x86 system starts an mode known as the real mode and you are limited to 1 MB of memory. When you are in BIOS you are typically in real mode, but GRUB actually puts into protected mode ( enable a20 , install a dummy GDT , set LSB of CR0 register to 1 ). Once the grub has started its initialization the ebx register will point to the multiboot information, you can use this info to get info like where total amount of memory installed etc . The problem is that you cannot actually execute real mode code from protected mode straight away!

x86 actually provides a segmentation and paging memory management schemes and linux acutally really do not take advantage of the segmentation mechanism ( mainly because it needs to be as portable as possible ! , not all architectures support segmentation).

I know this is'nt very helping , but it is *very* difficult to change bios settings from windows /linux if you do not know the hardware platform really well :). Also hope that something in my rambling interests you as well :)

--Lucifer

[Alzhy]

Thanks.

I have not downloaded the SSToolkit yet but I am pretty sure there is that utility there as other X86 platforms - IBM, DELL, SUN have similar tools.

But for my needs, I found out that simply disabling the FC_HBA BIOS will give me the fix I need. So with Boot Controller Order FIXED to FC-HBAs first, P410i SAS Controller 3rd - disabling the BIOS will set the Bootable HDD to the local RAIDed Disk.

So while booted in SANBOOT, disable the FC-HBA BIOSES as follows (True only for QLOGIC Based HBAs!!!):

for FC in `scli -i all|grep "Port Name"|awk '{print $NF}'`;do
scli -n $FC EB 0
sleep 30
done

Reboot and Server will boot off the local disk.

Now to switch to SAN BOOT, just do the above - this time doing an "scli -n $FC EB 1". ANd Server will boot off the SAN Boot Lun.

Problem fixed!