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Re: [Testbed-admins] Booting error in Customizing the Generic Image

Hello Mike,

This is not a BIOS controlled RAID. Actually, it uses one Adaptec RAID
5805 card to configure disk managing stuff. The RAID card has its own
BIOS management part after the onboard BIOS loading. You can see my
attached picture about the RAID controller BIOS loading and management.
But this confuses me about the MBR boot loader which boots straight
locally.

Best Regards,

Cheng Cui
. Frey Computing Services Center . Baton Rouge, LA 70803

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Hibler [mailto:mike@flux.utah.edu] 
Sent: Monday, October 19, 2009 9:48 AM
To: Cheng Cui
Cc: 'Mike Hibler'; Ryan Jackson; testbed-admins@flux.utah.edu
Subject: Re: [Testbed-admins] Booting error in Customizing the Generic
Image

On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 10:14:16PM -0500, Cheng Cui wrote:
> Hello Mike,
> 
> Thanks for your previous help about the pxeboot problem on loading the
> local FreeBSD part. 
> However, neither the pxeboot62a or pxeboot72 or even several versions
of
> loader including our own compiled generic loader under /boot will
work.
> The bootstrap always looks itself twice and confused about the disk
> type. You can refer to the attached picture in which I used generic
> loader for FreeBSD6.4. And I guess the pxeboot72 still got confused in
> the loading process. By the way, the Sun box used 4 high-speed disks
in
> RAID-0 with total volume around 500GB.
> 

This is a BIOS supported RAID (aka, "fakeraid") correct?  The bootloader
uses BIOS calls to read the disk, and if the BIOS was unaware of the
striping
of the disks, bad things would happen.  But again, that would have shown
up
when you booted straight through the MBR boot loader, and that works.

> Is there any further possible improvement to solve this problem or is
> this problem ignorable? Thanks a lot.
> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> Cheng Cui
> . Frey Computing Services Center . Baton Rouge, LA 70803
> 

At the moment, this is not ignorable.  Even if your users don't care
about
running FreeBSD, the link shaping system requires FreeBSD.

I don't have the time to look into this further, so the next thing to
try
is using the "Linux-based" (actually GRUB-based) pxeboot and friends.
I'll have Ryan Jackson here get you what you need to try that.

Attachment: Adaptec RAID BIOS.JPG
Description: JPEG image

Attachment: RAID controller management.JPG
Description: JPEG image