Hardware humbug

[unixronin]

To summarize the underlying problem, babylon5's Linux install is ancient and clogged with cruft, and its SCSI hard disks are dying rapidly.

Simple solution:  Install an inexpensive SATA controller and a new mirrored pair of SATA disks.

Well, by swapping controllers around so that the existing SCSI disks aren't the first devices, I can get the machine — which is built on an Asus A7V333 motherboard — to boot from a SCSI CDROM which it will not, as a general matter of course, condescend to boot from.  From that CDROM I can boot a Gentoo liveCD, set up the new disk, install Gentoo, build a kernel, set up grub, etc, etc, etc, all with relatively little issue (aside from the part where I typo'd "-mtune=athlon-xp" as "-mtune=athlonxp" which resulted in gcc declining to compile anything).

There's just one problem.  Try as I might, this motherboard WILL NOT boot from SATA.  Leaving me squarely behind the eight ball for upgrading the machine, I think, unless I hold my nose and suffer with PATA.  It'd be cheaper to buy a new motherboard, CPU and RAM than to buy a pair of new SCSI disks.

(Update 2355:  I didn't even have much luck with PATA so far.  I even tried dropping in my one good spare PATA disk, an 80GB Seagate Barracuda of uncertain age, just to put a bootloader on its MBR to boot the SATA disk. No joy; grub would install but wouldn't load.)

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

There is no onboard SCSI. There's one SiI3124 four-port SATA controller and one Adaptec AHA29160 (previously two, but I ran into crippling IRQ-shortage issues when I added the SATA controller).

If the AHA29160 is the first controller, the machine will boot from disks attached to that controller, but will boot from the CDROM attached to it (or, formerly, to the second SCSI controller) only if it finds no SCSI disks. If the SATA controller is first, then it refuses to boot from SATA (either disk or CD/DVD), ignores the SCSI disks because they're not on the first controller, then finds — and boots from — the SCSI CDROM.

So, basically, if there's a bootable SCSI disk first up, it'll boot from it. If there's no bootable SCSI disk in the first slot, it'll eventually find the SCSI CDROM. But it doesn't consider SATA devices bootable, period, and doesn't appear to even see them.

[tomatoe333.livejournal.com]

Sil? Hmmm, I remember those being REALLY crappy controllers...

If there is an on-board BIOS/firmware, get into that, and tell it that one of the SATA drives is drive C:. That'll get it to be bootable.

If there is no BIOS/firmware, therein lies the problem.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Firmware in the SiI3124? Hmm ..... that possibility hadn't occurred to me. I may be able to do that.

(Update: No, the 3124 does have onboard firmware, but it can't do that ... it's solely for setting up RAID configurations.)