Linux not adhering to BIOS Drive boot order?
Quoted 7 lines · Matthew D. Pitts
Guys,
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And this is a problem that has plagues all PC operating systems, but has never been a problem on the Macintosh. Why? Because the Mac was designed to handle this problem, but the PC never was.
Quite true on this point.
Amiga handles it too.
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The Mac never enumerates its devices like the PC does (no C: D: etc, no
/dev/sda,/dev/sdb, or anything like that). It also remembers the boot device in its EEPROM (the Startup Disk Control Panel handles this).For ATA drives the bios handles this.
No it doesn't. Put your root-fs on hda6 ( not unusual in dual boot setups ),
delete hda5, watch your linux fail to boot.
( the kernel will be loaded , but it won't find the root-fs , because it looks
in hda6 , but the partition has "migrated" to hda5 )
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The only way to solve this problem is the DESIGN IT INTO THE OS! Someone needs to stand up and say, "This is a problem, and I'm going to fix it." There needs
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Amen to that !
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to be a "device mount order database" or some kind, and all the disk drivers need to access that database to determine where to put the devices it finds.
NO! What needs to happen is:
1) the person who installs a second scsi card should read the manual BEFORE installing it so they know how to disable the boot features if they aren't needed,
This won't fix the "kernel doesn't find root-fs" problem.
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or
2) install only one bootable scsi card, period.
Same ( or similar ) problem as before ...
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Anything else is a useless kludge that will come back and bite us in the ass.
Kludges are bad, unfortunately that is all we have currently :-(
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The only problem is BIOS boot. That information is, I believe, stored in the ESCD, but I don't know if it's reliable enough and complete enough to be usable by Linux.
It seems to work well enough.
For the "load the kernel" part.
Most of the times.
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Matthew D. Pitts
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