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Linux chokes when adding drives

Trouble booting when adding 5th and 6th drives

         

familyman

8:11 pm on Feb 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I am building a server with 8 drives.

2 on 1st onboard controller (booting /dev/hda)
2 on 2nd onboard controller
2 on 3rd onboard controller
2 on PCI controller

I can boot Windows and see all 8 drives with partition magic, but I'm having trouble with Linux.

Linux boots fine when the following drives are plugged in:

2 on 1st onboard controller (booting /dev/hda)

Linux boots fine when the following drives are plugged in:

2 on 1st onboard controller (booting /dev/hda)
2 on PCI controller

If I plug in any of the other 4 drives Linux will mount the filesystem as read only and then hang 1/2 way through boot.

Any ideas?

MattyMoose

11:11 pm on Feb 25, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Wow.... Are all of these IDE drives?

I can't help you with your problem, other than to say I'm not surprised it's not working. Or rather, I'm surprised it's working at all. ;)

-MM

familyman

4:35 pm on Feb 27, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Yes, they are IDE drives. It would really surprise me if Windows ME could handle all the IDEs and Linux couldn't.

Do you think I would have to use SCSI drives for an array this big?

MattyMoose

2:19 am on Feb 28, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member




Do you think I would have to use SCSI drives for an array this big?

I would seriously recommend it, yes... What's the reason that you're using 8 Hard Drives for? Are they going to be some type of Software RAID?

If you've got massive storage requirements, I'd really recommend SCSI. Not only is it faster, but more reliable. You can build your system with the SCSI drives as "normal", and then build them into hot-swappable systems later if you need to. IDE AFAIK, doesn't support Hot-Swap.

Your previous problem is kinda interesting though... What Flavour, and Kernel are you running? Can you provide some dmesg output? I know you won't be able to copy and paste, but maybe a couple of lines, maybe something to do with "/dev/hdX".

Also, how long did you let it try to boot for? 1/2 hour, or 30 seconds? I'm just wondering if it's doing some searching, or something weird on the disks while it's booting.

Also, are those disks fdisk'd and newfs'd yet? Did you add them into /etc/fstab already?

-MM