[ale] Booting from Promise Ultra133 TX2

[Courtney Thomas]

John,

I hope I'm not throwing you off on this  :-(

I use a Promise100 card with Freebsd4.3. It's been a while since I set 
it up but I don't recall any requirement except that SCSI is the boot 
option which is selected in the BIOS, of course. I'm not using any other 
HDs, e.g. with IDE controllers; or, for that matter other SCSI drives in 
this machine.

In fact I'm not going to use the card after it goes down, in that I use 
"dd" to occasionally duplicate my drive [in this machine] and 
introducing another piece of hardware, that costs $, to fail, is not 
worth it.

I'm going to just set up a cron command to dd the drive occasionally and 
that's more than good enough for my purposes.

I don't think Promise hardware is worth the time.

I hear good things about Escalade cards, but unless someone is running 
large SQL databases or webservers of some kind, I doubt all this is 
worth the time. But if I were.....I'd duplicate all the hardware as well.

I am also using a Promise100 card under WinNT4.0 and haven't tried any 
crash/mirror availability tests on it yet. I'm pessimistic on that.

Given dd and cron I can't see any real value in hardware/raid solutions, 
for me, though I must add I've got several other boxes running 
implementations such as Raid5, but have found the complexity creates 
more problems than it solves, for me   :-)

Cordially,
Courtney

John Wells wrote:

> Courtney Thomas said:
> 
>>Since all worked before the BIOS update, and obviously the drive and
>>card are compatible, and work, I don't see what other choice remains
>>than..... the new BIOS,..... assuming you're using Grub in both cases
>>and that it's unmodified.
>>
>>
> 
> Courtney, the bios upgrade allowed me actually select the promise card as
> a boot option...I've never actually used the card or drive in this machine
> before.
> 
> What do you use, lilo?  Any special boot options?
> 
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