LH Pro, NetRAID and Redhat

[Jeff Lewis_5]

I am trying to install 7.1 on an HP Netserver LH Pro.

It has: Dual Pentium Pro CPUs@200Mhz
128Mb RAM
2Gb SCSI drive on the internal aic78xx controller
(3) 4.3Gb drives in a RAID5 config running on an
NetRAID controller

Redhat steadfastly refuses to allow me (or I am too newbie to know how) to set the 2Gb drive as the boot drive. It always wants the RAID to be the boot drive. The NetRAID card is set to not boot so the 2Gb drive MUST hold the boot partition. Each time I start an install, the RAID becomes sda, and ends up with the MBR. I tried installing /boot on sdb, but at the end of the install, RH7.1 warned me that /boot was not on the partition with the master boot record. A subsequent reboot confirmed the futility of this install attempt.

I have sucessfully installed Novell's intraNetware, WinNT4, Win2k, Solaris7 and just recently, FreeBSD. All recognize that the 2Gb drive is the one to install on. I also tried to install 7.1 AFTER the Win2k, Solaris7 and the FreeBSD installs, hoping that it would then see that the 2Gb drive held the boot partition. This didn't work either.

I have nothing on here that I NEED to keep on here. Very willing to start fresh.

Jeff

[Stuart Browne]

What happens if you run 'fdisk' on /dev/sdb, and print the partition table. Does a little * come up beside any of the partitions to say that it's active and bootable?

In any case, the /boot/ section of a RH filesystem is usually only small (20-50 Mb) as it ONLY holds the kernel details and nothing more. Assigning 2Gb is excessive, and possibly getting it to complain about 1024 cylinder boundries.

What NetRAID controller is it? Something like the 1Si (using 'megaraid.o' as the driver) ?

I've not done any tests with this sort of arrangement, prefering to boot of the RAID array.

Do you mind if I ask why you aren't wanting it to boot of that array?

[Jeff Lewis_5]

Thanks for the quick reply Stuart.

As part of a SOP of mine, I set up a system partition (usually mirrored, but not in this case) and put the OS there.

The RAID is setup to hold all significant data, the purpose of the box. (files for file servers, db for sql servers, etc.)

As such, I've been trying to set this up the same way. Again, could do so in NT4, 2k, Sol7 and FreeBSD on this very box.

I can't answer the question reliably regarding running fdisk. I've run it many times to no avail, so no configuration sticks out. The last time I ran it, I purposely put /boot on sdb. I allocated it 32mb. 128mb of SWAP and /VAR were also on here. Root and /home were on the 8gb RAID volume, equally divided. This is from memory, don't hold me to it.

Reviewing that, I'm not very proud of it either. Kind of defeated the purpose of having the OS on the 2gb drive, didn't it?

I do remember that at the end of the anaconda installation, I was warned that /boot was on the wrong drive, one without the /MBR. I believe that the message stated that the /MBR could only be on sda and that /boot must be on there as well. It wouldn't boot afterwards.

So, I installed Win2k on it. I purposely did NOT touch the RAID with respect to formatting, etc. Then using DiskManager, erase all partitions from the RAID, and formatted it FAT32. Now there is no MBR on the RAID, right?

Start reinstall, go to fdisk, go to Disk Druid, doesn't matter - same results. RAID = sda and 2Gb drive = sdb.

I am no longer positive about the exact controller. Yes, it loads megaraid. I need to be certain, down to the X#### number HP assigns them.

So how do I tell the system that the 2gb drive should be sda and the RAID should be sdb?

Jeff

[Stuart Browne · Accepted solution]

LILO comes to mind here. At the lilo prompt you should be able to tell it where to boot from, reguardless of where it's placing the MBR.

At the LILO: prompt, using 'boot=/dev/sdb' should tell it where the OS is to boot from (this can also be put in the lilo.conf (man lilo.conf)).

Another option is the modification of 'lilo.conf' and swap the SCSI disks around, ie:

disk=/dev/sdb
bios=0x80
disk=/dev/sda
bios=0x81

Whether you can do this via 'anaconda' is a different question, possibly in 'expert' mode you could.

Once again, 'man lilo.conf' is your friend. So are the documetns in /usr/share/doc/lilo-*/, but yes. Hope this gives you a bit more of an idea of where to head.