[lug] 2 Hard Drive Configuration

[John Karns]

On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Gregory Haggquist said:

> I have the following systems which I would like to combine to a dual
> boot system. Hard Drive A has RedHat 8.0 and Hard Drive 2 has 9.0,
> both were set up separately with one hard drive. I have 2 IDE
> controllers, and one cable can not reach both drives. The only way I
> can connect both drives at once is to use two cables - a Primary
> Master and a Secondary Master. If I connect one drive at a time I can
> boot up the respective operating systems. I have both drives with the
> jumper setting on SINGLE, is this correct? I am assuming the
> MASTER/SLAVE setting is when you have 2 drives on one cable.

It would be mandatory in that case, yes.  But if one chose to do so, one
could also choose either setting if the drives were connected via separate
channels - e.g., drv A as master on ide channel 1 and drv B as slave on
ide chan 2.

The devices designations would depend on the phyical connection cfg:

chan 1 master: /dev/hda
chan 1 slave:  /dev/hdb
chan 2 master: /dev/hdc
chan 2 slave:  /dev/hdd

> What I want is to be able to have both hard drives connected at the
> same time and choose which system to boot. If I boot on Hard Drive A I
> would still like to access data on Hard Drive B and vis-à-vis.

You would set that up in your boot loader (the newer grub or the older
lilo).


> Any suggestions I how to configure this?

After setting up your boot loader (see the how-to docs about that -
perhaps installed on your system under /usr/doc, or usr/local/doc,
depending on what pkgs you have installed; also available at
www.tldp.org), then you would ned to edit the /etc/fstab on drv B to
correlate according how you connected it, as above.


> I would be willing to re-install RedHat 9.0 on hard drive B with both
> hard drives connected if that is a viable path.

Viable, but unnecessary.

----------------------------------------------------------------
John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net