PE1950 SAS5i: boot from second hard drive?

Kilian CAVALOTTI kilian.cavalotti at lip6.fr
Wed Mar 26 22:15:23 CDT 2008


Hi all,

I got a PE1950 with a simple SAS5i controller (no RAID). I've stuck a 
second hard drive in the second bay, and I'd like to do software RAID. It 
works great so far, OS-wise.

However, I can't find a way to boot from this second disk. If the first one 
fails, grub won't be accessible, and it won't boot. That's why I'd like to 
install grub on the 2nd drive as well, and be able to boot from it 
(otherwise my RAID is pretty useless).

Partitions on both disks are marked bootable, but nowhere in the BIOS 
settings, nor in the controller BIOS (Ctrl+C), can I find a way to tell it 
to boot from the 2nd drive. The only boot setting is about 
the /controller/ itself, not the disks. And the boot menu only 
presents "Hard Drive C:" (when I select that, the 'popup' submenu only 
displays the first disk. That's a bit frustrating. :)

So, my question is very simple: is it possible to boot from the 2nd bay 
with a SAS5i controller? And if so, what's the magic trick to enable that?

Thanks,
-- 
Kilian 



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