A.P. Lawrence

swapping a hard drive, hot swap, raid, divvy, badtrk

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From: Bela Lubkin <belal@caldera.com>
Subject: Re: Swapping a hd in 5.0.6
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 09:17:47 GMT References: <20021108112935.A9421@egps.egps.com> <60bd4c6b.0211091357.7e2619cb@posting.google.com> <20021109163557.12771@tegan.com>

Tom Parsons wrote:

> Brian K. White enscribed:

> | boot up, and at the boot: prompt enter "DEFBOOTSTR biosgeom"
> | enter the root passwd to go into single-user mode instead of booting
> | all the way up.
> 
> And at this point, your method becomes superflous.
> 
> He has SCSI, SCSI disks.  The bios doesn't care or know about the
> geometry of scsi disks.

You're both wrong...  "biosgeom" is a dangerous little piece of fire
that OpenServer offers the unwary admin.  It unfortunately overrides the
geometry of _EVERY_ hard disk in the system, even ones that were long
since successfully configured.  Every hard disk refers back to some set
of BIOS parameters that the kernel digs up from somewhere that I
probably couldn't explain even if I spent the next 8 hours studying
kernel source.

This may be OK if you said "biosgeom" every time you added a disk, over
the system's history (Brian's statement implies that he does this).  On
a system which has not been grown in this manner, typing "biosgeom" when
trying to add a new disk is likely to cause all the old disks to become
inaccessible (until rebooted without "biosgeom" -- which should be
seconds later, since it probably won't boot successfully).

Phone and Email Support at Monthly rates

What's wanted is a way to say "refer to BIOS for geometry of specific
disk #N", but it does not exist.  And, I'll repeat, exactly what
"biosgeom" means for any particular drive is almost impossible to
understand, much less explain.

>Bela<

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