Grub or Lilo with 1.2TB RAID?

Hi,

Does Lilo or Grub has a known bug with a 1.2TB Raid Disk?

I have 8 of 180GB disk attached to 3ware 7850 controller cards. Either lilo and grub does not allow me to boot after installation.

Thanks in advance.

What makes you think it is lilo or grub that won't 'allow' you?

You can't boot on a raid device! At least, not unless

a) you are extremely lucky b) extremely careful c) extremely knowledgable

In other words, what does you bios think about all this? Tell us if there is an option to boot from a strange device like that!

But that's not 'booting from raid'. That's 'booting from an initrd'. The initrd itself must be on a (bios) supported medium.

What on earth are you talking about? All my admin machines boot from Raid5 drives with no problem at all. I use IBM ServerRaid cards that make them look like a normal SCSI drive. It is a pain in the arse to have to have a one drive Raid 0 for swap and /tmp though. The other thing is that you have to include ips.o in your initrd image. As far as I know, that's all that's required as far as linux is concerned.

You might have to configure the Raid drives with a stand alone bootable

I'm talking about your bios not supporting boot from a hard raid device.

What are YOU taking about, and which planet are YOU from?

Bully for you. Now go boil your head in oil.

Happy happy happy.

No, it's nothing much to do with 'linux'.

Raid1? Mirror?

OK, but then you can just as well boot without an initrd.

It shouldn't. I have plenty of machines that can't boot from scsi, let alone boot from raid. For them one needs another boot medium. An initrd on a cheap old 400MB ide disk usually works fine.

But updating an initrd image is hell .. I always forget what the linuxrc script inside does and have to figure out the booting process every time. Also, the image is only 4MB expanded, which means that only the minimal modules can be in there (several boot images), so I have to scrape away.

Sure - but also pretty uncommon for anything else.

Well, choosing not to add support for the boot media in the kernel is a personal decision of yours. It helps to maintain the use of a single kernel across many machines, but in the end its usually easier to just compile the driver in and have done with it.

Most of my scsi cards (symbios, ncr ..) don't boot. Even the ones that say they do and have a bios of their own don't boot when placed in many machines!

It is only not difficult if you have the appropriate hardware and bios. I knew I'd be blasted for saying so! But I stand by my estimate of it being 60/40 across all extant machines and mobos and bioses ...

/sbin/mkinitrd usually gets it right.

/sbin/mkbootdisk will make something that will work on most machines too.