[ale] Machine With Drives @ e,f,g,h: help?

[James P. Kinney III]

Oh, joy! The default RH (an most others) installation kernel are not set
up to have a hard drive on controllers 3 or higher. You have three
choices (other than pull out hair, which may happen anyway)
1. Compile a custom boot kernel that supports the chipset and the
subsequent location of the drives and boot from from a floppy, or burn
your own RH boot disk.

2. mount a HD on a lower numbered controller and use that to boot from.

3. Dig through the bios and look for a way to renumber/reorder the
drives.

It might be possible to pass a boot parameter such as hde=0x080 (not the
correct value. I don't remember the correct one. Kernel docs on boot
parameters?)

from man lilo.conf:

disk=device-name
              Defines non-standard parameters for  the  specified 
disk.   See
              section  "Disk  geometry"  of  user.tex for details. 
Especially
              useful is the `bios=' parameter.  The BIOS  numbers  your 
disks
              0x80, 0x81, etc. and it is impossible to decide which
Linux disk
              corresponds to which BIOS disk (since this depends on 
the  BIOS
              setup, and on the type of BIOS), so if you have an unusual
setup
              you need to state the correspondence  between  Linux 
disks  and
              BIOS disks.  For example,

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

              would  say  that your SCSI disk is the first BIOS disk,
and your
              (primary master) IDE disk is the second BIOS disk.


On Fri, 2003-01-03 at 17:52, Danny Cox wrote:
> Howdy!
> 
> 	I've gotten a 1U machine with 4 drives, and a slim CD rom drive.  The
> controler for the CD rom has the usual layout: hd{a,b,c,d}, with the CD
> rom on hda.  Another chipset, a Promise 20276 has the drives
> hd{e,f,g,h}.  Red Hat 8.1 and 7.3 refuse to install on it (not finding
> any drives), and at least one phrase in their installation notes implies
> that I'm SOL because the BIOS (and therefore LILO and GRUB) can only
> access the first four drives.
> 
> 	What say ye?  Do I have any chance at all, or in the immortal words of
> Norm (Cheers), "It's a dog-eat-dog world, and I'm wearing Milk-Bone
> underwear!"
-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics) <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 



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