Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 23:47:50 -0400 (EDT) From: Jaime Kikpole <jaime@malkav.snowmoon.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Booting from RAID5 array? (fwd) Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9910062346340.40707-100000@malkav.snowmoon.com>
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I tried sending this in earlier, but it didn't come back to me (from the list) yet, so I'm not sure if I made a mistake. I'm re-sending it but I appologise if this is a second copy. Jaime ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Is it possible to boot FreeBSD (3.3-Release) from a RAID-5 array? Specifically, I'm trying to get this to work on a Netfinity 5000, a DPT SmartCache IV, and 4 SCSI hot-swapable drives in the Netfinity's bays. I've unplugged the SCSI cables from the Netfinity's mother board and plugged them into the DPT card. Then I used the DPT configuration software (I had to run it from a MS-DOS boot floppy... bleh) to make a single array that contained all four disks. The FreeBSD 3.3 boot floppies recognised this array as da0, which it claimed was 26000+ MB large. Since its made from four 9.1GB drives, I thought that that number sounded right. The boot floppies claimed to install FreeBSD 3.3 off of the FTP site (although it complained that there was no distribution named "local" to install....) and everything looked OK as far as I could tell. But when I reboot, it can't find a bootable disk. As for my experience, I've never worked with SCSI before except for external devices on Macintosh computers. Its entirely possible that I did something dumb, so feel free to grasp at straws if you have any ideas for me to try! :) Also, I've never worked with RAID before. So if there's some special "blessing" that I have to do on the drive or if FreeBSD just can't boot from a RAID array, please let me know. BTW, the only suggestion (so far) that made some level of sense was to switch to Linux. Is this really going to be necessary? Between my FreeBSD experience and Linux's "patch of the hour" approach, I'd rather not do that. Thanks in advance! Jaime To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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