Linux boot from a PCI IDE card?

[lardman]

Can Linux be made to boot from what I think is called a PCI RAID card (though it just acts as an extra 4 IDE slots)?

I've seen that there's a HowTo (for example here: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Boot+Root+Raid+LILO-4.html)

Does anyone have any experience of this?

Cheers,


Si

[stupkid]

Whether or not you can boot from a particular device is up to the BIOS on your particular system.  If the BIOS supports booting from the device then it is just a matter of configuring your kernel and initrd image to have the proper hardware support.  At a minimum you could have an IDE device that the /boot file system is on to boot and then your rootfs could be on the RAID array.

Hope this helps,

-Bryan

[Bundabrg]

The short answer: Yes you can. I've done it plenty of times.

Longer:  You would almost certainly need an initrd, and it would need to support it. Get the modules and add to the initrd, and bobs your uncle.

Brendan

[lardman]

Hmm, I was hoping I could have WinXP on my main HDD (SATA), and then use this RAID card to plug in a standard (read cheap and I already have one) IDE HDD with Linux on it.

I'll have to wait for my PC to turn up and see what I can do with it.

Cheers for the suggestions,


Si

[Stubear]

If you're not going to run raid for the linux then it's relativly simple.

If you are using grub to boot both XP and linux then just install grub on the SATA (you could make a small 10mb partition for grub and the kernels).

If you want to run raid on the PCI ide then you most probably need initrd unless you are running hardware RAID - probably not as they are expensive.

If you only want to boot from the PCI ide card then you will probably have to change the boot order in your bios - for some reason my PCI ide card comes under SCSI on the boot order in my old phoenix bios.

Stu

P.S. I highly recommend you use grub over lilo - it's prettier and much easier to setup - with the added bonus that you can edit the boot menu during bootup - great if you make a mess up your config file and only find out when you can't boot anymore.