[gentoo-user] Re: Duplicate identical Hard Disk

[walt]

On 04/02/2010 08:46 AM, Joseph wrote:
> On 04/02/10 09:42, Neil Bothwick wrote:
>> On Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:47:09 -0700, walt wrote:
>>
>>> However, if you want to leave both cables connected and change your
>>> BIOS to boot from 'sdb', you will need to edit some of the files on
>>> 'sdb',
>>
>> Check your BIOS first, some allow you to disable individual SATA ports,
>> so you can disconnect the drive without pulling cables.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Neil Bothwick
>
> Good suggestion, but I'm not sure my motherboard BIOS supports it.
> I have GA-MA790GP-DS4H motherboard, reading from the manual:
>
> it has OnChip SATA Type (SATA2_0 ~ SATA2_3 connectors)
> Mode: Native IDE
> RAID
> AHCI - Advanced Host Controller to enable advanced Serial ATA features such as Native Command Queuing and hot plug.
>
> Is it the one AHCI? I've never used it. I'm more interested in configuring it as an auxiliary drive "sdb" to serve as a bootable backup. The box will be installed in a remote location and I'll have an ssh access to it.
>
> The box is running in a medical clinic and I'm mostly concern that after the emerge if something happens, I want the user to be able to boot "grub" from second drive, and it will be "sdb" (hd1); but during normal operation, when running from "sda" I want
> to backup some application files to it so "sdb" stays current.

Ah, well, having only remote access rules out unplugging cables or changing
BIOS settings unless there is someone at the site who can do those things.

Seems like you would be better off to set up grub on sda so it can boot from
sda by default, but also so a remote user can just choose sdb from grub's menu.
That assumes that sda is physically intact enough to load grub from sda.  You
seem to be more worried about software screwups than hardware failure.  But
you will need to edit the handful of config files on sdb so all the right
filesystems will mount correctly.