Hp TC3100 netserver
Bruce M Simpson
bms at spc.org
Sun Feb 16 20:45:06 GMT 2003
On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 06:41:17PM +0000, Jeff LaCoursiere wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> Hp provided us with a couple TC3100 servers (P4's I think) with ultra scsi
> disks. Have been using 4.5 on them for some time. I need to add disk for a
> specific task, and the task is simply storage. I don't care about speed or
> redundancy even - just a bunch of temp storage. I asked for quotes for a
> large (say > 100G) IDE drive, thinking a few hundred quid. I get back a reply
> that IDE is not supported in this unit, though there *is* an IDE controller.
> Apparently if you try to put a disk on it the BIOS will try to boot the IDE
> drive wether there is an OS on it or not. Failing that it won't even try the
> scsi?
>
> Supposing this is actually true, would it be possible to put boot blocks on
> the IDE drive to force it to boot a partition on the SCSI disk?
In theory this should be possible, but you might either have to write a
special boot block that knows which drive number to pass to the BIOS to
boot from the chosen SCSI disk, or chain a number of them together.
This not-booting-SCSI behaviour sounds like a quirk of the BIOS on that
unit. If the SCSI BIOS sees the SCSI drives, and creates BIOS drive numbers
from them, then it should be possible to boot from them, even if it involves
strange INT 19h hacks.
BMS
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