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]

It's a possibility, I suppose. Most likely all it really needs to have on it is grub. I'm guessing I could probably make that work with a little tiny floppy-sized CompactFlash card (wouldn't even need to be 1MB) and a PATA adapter. The adapter would probably cost more than the flash card.

Update: Actually, it looks as though I'd have to go flash card on CF-to-2.5" adapter on 2.5"-to-3.5" adapter. It would be fairly cheap, about $20 plus a CF card, but it might work. The Heath-Robinson factor is climbing ... but I suppose it would be kind of a cool hack, if it worked.