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

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

SCSI is so 20th-century....

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Maybe so, but based on this evening's experiences I think this machine would sooner go to meet its ancestors than boot from a SATA device. (I even tried installing a spare PATA disk of unknown age, solely to install a bootloader on its MBR. That didn't work either.) And it's not as though the motherboard is even that old - 2003 or so.