Linux Software Raid 1 Recovery Question

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

John Abreau wrote:
> Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> writes:
> 
> 
>>On Wed, Sep 25, 2002 at 02:08:29PM -0400, John Abreau wrote:
>>
>>>The problem is the typical PC boots only from hda and is unable to
>>>boot from hdc.
>>
>>Then what is the BIOS asking about when it lets me say what I want to
>>boot from?  For example, HDD-0, HDD-1, HDD-2, and HDD-3, CDROM, LAN,
>>etc.?  I assumed that this means it would look for an MBR on the
>>specified disk.  Is this a new feature not in early BIOSes?
> 
> 
> I've never seen that type of support in a PC's BIOS. Your typical 
> motherboard gives a simpler selection of "HDD, FLOPPY, CDROM", 
> and a few offer a "Boot from SCSI BIOS" option in addition.

My most recent PC (1.33 GHz Athlon), based on an ASUS A7M266 motherboard, offers to boot from any of the attached IDE devices, which include two hard disks, a CD-RW drive, and a DVD-RAM drive, as well as from floppy disk. It would also offer boot from LAN if I had it enabled in the BIOS - but I think it only works with the built-in LAN option for the motherboard, which I don't have (they weren't shipping it yet at the time I got the system), not with a PCI NIC. I don't, alas, run Linux on it. It's my multimedia system, and it runs Windows 2000; Linux doesn't yet support a lot of the stuff (video capture and editing, DVD burning, HDTV recording and playback) that I use it for.

If I had a new ASUS motherboard such as an A7V266 with four IDE controllers, I'm sure it would offer to boot from all eight IDE devices, assuming I had that many connected.

My point is that some newer systems do indeed support booting from any drive, and they will look for an MBR on the drive you select. (I mention ASUS motherboards, but I'm sure that other manufacturers have similar features.) That means that you if you can live with a limit of one OS per hard drive, you can have a multi-boot system with no boot manager software at all.