Linux no go on internal SATA port, Dell PowerEdge 2950 III

[CougTek]

On a Dell PowerEdge 2950 III, I have a stripe of 2x 73GB SAS drive connected on the Perc 6/i adapter and one SSD connected to the motherboard's SATA port. There's no way to make the integrated SATA port bootable from what I can see :

Server BIOS :



The SSD is connected and it's possible to read/write from it, but the motherboard's BIOS somehow refuses to acknowledge that it's connected. Why is that a problem? Because it isn't bootable that way :



I can only boot from the array, not from the integrated SATA ports.

Why is that a problem? Because when I try to install a Linux operating system, it always detects the SSD as sda and the array as sdb. Therefore, it tries to put GRUB on the MBR of sda...but it's not bootable! I want to install the OS on the array and run a database on the SSD. How can I tell Linux to put GRUB to use the array as the primary boot storage device instead of the SSD connected to the internal SATA port?

BTW, no comment regarding the OS being on a stripe. It's a test server and it's not really my decision to go for a stripe.

 

[Mercutio]

What's stopping you from installing without the SATA drive on the native port and adding it after the fact with mknod?

 

[CougTek]

Nothing prevents me from doing so. I'll try. There must be a way to do it with the drive plug in though. To Hell with it, I'll remove the SSD during the OS installation.

 

[CougTek]

I've finally been able to install a distro that worked. I went with Wheezy (Debian 7.0) and upgraded the kernel to version 3.8.2 (from the original 3.2 that came with Wheezy).

SMS Linux worked too, but I'm not very familiar with Slackware, so when I saw that I could succesfully installed Debian, I forgot about SMS.

For some unknown reason, all Ubuntu-kin distributions failed since I created the RAID 0 array. I've tried Ubuntu server 12.04.2, 13.04, Lubuntu 12.04 and 13.04 to no avail. It worked before. Now, all I ended up with was a black screen when the OS tried to load. No error message. All the installation process went well. No idea what's the problem.

Anyway, Debian works, has repositories and synaptic pacquet manager, so I'm satisfied. It also boots with the SSD plug to the internal SATA port of the motherboard. All is well regarding the OS in itself. I'm having a hard time figuring how to install Mariadb 5.5, but that's the subject of another thread.

 

[blakerwry]

On that first screenshot you can usually hit the space bar to change the drive type from off to auto (or some better choice). Was that not working?

 

[CougTek]

Hitting space bar switched the port to auto like you said. Thanks. Now the BIOS says it's an unknown device, but if I hit F11 (the boot menu) during the boot up process, I see the embedded SATA port among the boot options.

I won't reinstall Ubuntu on the server for now because Debian is installed and does what I want. ll probably revisit the subect later on though, so that helped me a lot.