Topic: e-smith booting from Adaptec 2110S with RAID5 !!!

[kamikaze]

First of all, thank you to the dev team of e-smith for such a great distro.
I'm a total newbie at this linux stuff but look at me, I've got e-smith running on my raid-5 array straight up ! No ide or floppy booting, it boots straight from the raid !

First a question, then how I did it.

1- I changed my e-smith HD from ide (hda) to scsi raid-5 (sda) and
   I had to change lilo.conf and fstab from /etc to get this to work.
   Now whenever a do expand-template on lilo.conf or fstab, it reset my
   entries back to hdc6 for root and hdc5 for swap
   I've looked at the templates in /etc/e-smith/templates/ but can't figure out
   what is to be modified.
So the question is: What do I do to permanently change the hdc to sda in my
lilo.conf and fstab ??

2- How I did it:

-Installed e-smith onto a small ide drive (4gb)

-upgraded the kernel to include drivers for my I2O card using the rpms found at:
http://people.redhat.com/tcallawa/dpt/
*** warning: the ftp site that holds the rpms can't be reach if your running MS
Windows because the adresse ends with .255 and Windows won't allow it. ***

-search the web for help on switching linux to a new drive and found this:
http://panopticon.csustan.edu/thood/newdisk.txt

-used NortonGhost to transfer the IDE partitions to the RAID array.

-booted e-smith using the new kernel.

-backed up lilo.conf and fstab

-modified lilo.conf and fstab to point to sda instead of hdc

-ran lilo.
  Because lilo.conf now points to sda, it installed a working copy onto the MBR of
  the raid array.

-also ran mkbootdisk 2.2.19-7.0.8.DPT to have a boot disk with the new kernel.

-stopped the pc, pulled out ide drive and turned the pc back on with the floppy
  boot disk in the floppy drive.

-was greeted with the normal boot and then login screen

-logged in and checked /etc/lilo.conf and /etc/fstab. They were still set to hda... so changed hda for sda and ran /sbin/lilo to update.

-rebooted without the floppy boot disk and e-smith booted on its onw from the raid array !
Very sweet !!!!

I'm still not sure I understand everything I did... but it works and it's all that matters to me !!!!

[PC]

Got any suggestions for the Promise SX6000?

Dual P3-450
512MB ECC PC100
5 x 80GB Seagate Barracudas on Promise SX6000 RAID-5 (320GB
Yamaha F1 CD-RW (IDE)

Can't get e-smith to load on it.
Win 2K Server loads and boots just fine (with the 3rd party driver)

[Brad]

We are just looking into using the e-Smith product: have there been any significant developments with regard to using e-Smith with Adaptec RAID5 cards.  In particular we would most likely use the 2110S or the 2120S as I am very fond of these products and they work very well for us in the FreeBSD environment.  I noticed an announcement for ver 6.0 but cannot seem to locate it on any sites... what's with that??  Hoping we don't have to jump through lots of hoops to deploy a server with hardware raid5, hot swap, and hot spare.

[Dan Brown]

SME 6.0 was just released as beta, so you'll need to look in the "dev" directory for it.