Hard drive weirdness.

[Karl Larsen]

David Gibb wrote:
> I'm experiencing some weird behaviour with my disk drives, and I was
> hoping someone might be able to give me some hints.
>
> I have an oldish computer (AMD athlon 850) that I wanted to use as a
> file server. I had a 20GB PATA drive lying about, and I bought a
> promise sata300 tx4 card plus 2 500GB sata drives that were on
> special.
>
> I hooked the 2 sata drives to the card, and the PATA drive to the
> motherboard's controller, and then I installed ubuntu server 8.04 on
> the 20GB drive. Everything went smoothly until I rebooted after the
> install, when it couldn't find the system drive. I played around with
> the boot settings in the bios until I found that none of the 'IDE-X'
> settings worked, but 'SCSI' did. Once ubuntu started up, I found that
> the 20GB pata drive showed up as /dev/sdc, and the 2 500GB SATA drives
> showed up as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. I found this to be a touch weird,
> but everything seemed to be working so I left it as is.
>
> I then installed software RAID 1 on the two 500GB drives, then LVM on
> top of them, samba, etc, etc. Everything works great. I still wanted
> to simulate a drive failure, so that I could verify that the RAID
> mirroring was working, and to figure out which physical drive was
> which. Here's when the trouble started.
>
> When I pulled sata drive #1, I get a blank screen with a blinking
> cursor. No GRUB, no nothing. When I pulled sata drive #2, I get "GRUB
> Hard disk error". When I pull both disks, I get a "System disk not
> found" error.
>
> I guess my questions are as follows:
>
> 1) Does anyone know why my PATA drive isn't showing up as /dev/hda?
> 2) I guess I could possibly explain the "GRUB Hard disk error" if the
> absence of a drive caused the drive number to change, but I don't know
> why the absence of the other drive causes a blank screen.
> 3) Any idea how I should tinker with this system so that I can still
> boot it in case one of the raid drives fails?
>
> Thanks!
> David
>
>   
    Hi David welcome to the mix of PATA and SATA hard drives. I have one 
of each and my BIOS goes bonkers if both are running. I would do this: 
check your BIOS for a way to TELL each HD when to boot, or since I ain't 
got that, un-plug the PATA and use just the SATA, which I did and no 
more problems. But for sure it is a BIOS problem.

Karl


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
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