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76507
March 5th, 2012 14:00
Virtual Disk Assignment Order in Perc 6/i
Sorry if this has been hashed out before...
1) Can someone explain what controls which virtual disk becomes /dev/sda, which virtual disk becomes /dev/sdb, etc? More importantly, what controls which virtual disk is the boot disk (hd0,0)? I have one machine, for reasons I don't understand, where the system disk comes up as /dev/sdb and the /tmp disk comes up as /dev/sda. Needless to say, this causes boot issues as there is no MBR on the tmp disk. When I look in the PERC BIOS (CTRL-R on boot), I note that the system disk is called Virtual Disk 1 and the tmp disk is Virtual Disk 0. So the order looks like it is encoded there. However, I see NO way to swap the order. Open Manage doesn't even show virtual disk order.
2) I suspect I can hack around this by throwing in another drive, having the system view that as Virtual Disk 2, copying over the data and then never using Virtual Disk 0 again. That way, Virtual Disk 1 will be lower in order and should be the boot drive. However, this seems really ugly.
There has to be a way to tell the PERC BIOS which drive is the highest in precedence...
NetWise
7 Posts
0
March 5th, 2012 16:00
<ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell> Check page 109 of the Users Guide. Once you're in the controller BIOS, you can:
After you enable the BIOS for a controller, perform the following steps to enable
the boot support for that controller.
1 Press to access the Ctrl Mgmt menu screen.
2 Press to move the cursor to the Select Bootable VD in the
Settings box.
3 Press the down arrow key to display a list of virtual disks.
4 Use the down arrow key to highlight a virtual disk.
5 Press to select the virtual disk.
6 Press to move the cursor to the Apply button, and then press
to apply the selection.
Boot support is enabled for the selected controller.
That may or may not help the linux boot order, but it should determine which virtual disk is bootable. I'd think that would swap the order of the disks, although it may simply make sdb bootable and sda not. Ultimately, the 'cleanest' method would be to back up the data and build the VD's with the order you prefer, and go forward. That might not be the least time consuming though....
nishimur
3 Posts
0
March 5th, 2012 21:00
Thanks. I have seen the boot drive on the Ctrl Mgmt but seem to have forgotten about that. Yes, that fixes the MBR problem. I went ahead and copied the data on VD0 to VD2, then eliminated VD0, leaving VD1 as the system disk and VD2 as the scratch disk. This fixed the linux disk assignment order. I'm wondering if udev is the correct means to fix this.