Folks,
Over the weekend, I re-installed my Ultra 5 with the March 1st tree,
after hooking up a Compact Flash to IDE adapter for the on board IDE.
The system recognizes a 4GB CF card as an IDE disk and uses that to boot
(since Open Boot PROM requires that the device controller provide Fcode
suited to booting, which in this case is only true of the on-board one),
then uses a new SATA PCI adapter to run from a 320GB SATA disk.
I configured the system thus:
4 GB CF IDE "disk:
1). /boot (1GB)
2). /boot (1GB)
3). Whole disk
4). Unused
320 GB SATA hard disk:
1). /boot1 (1GB) - not used but for various purposes[0].
2). LVM (100GB)
3). Whole disk
4). LVM (100GB)
5). LVM (rest)
The Open Boot PROM is configured to boot "rawhide" by default, which
uses a boot type partition with "partition-boot" set in SILO running off
the first partition. There is also a regular "stable" Fedora install
using another SILO on the second partition. Thus I have completely
independent setups I can trivially switch between. For now, they both
pull from "development", but I will switch over when possible.
I didn't install twice (Anaconda does not like the physical disk layout
after you have already done one install, even partitioning manually, and
some time I can help figure out why - I know the Anaconda swap and LVM
needs some attention). What I did was to dd the content of the LV from
the first install to form the second, after imaging the /boot. I then
changed the UUIDs with tune2fs, changed hostname, recreated ssh keys,
after changing IP, etc. So they're two separate "hosts" on the same
system and it's pretty clear which one is running at once.
I recommend this approach. The SATA disk is drastically faster than the
original very legacy IDE on the Ultra 5. The use of a flash disk is very
reliable (in theory, anyway) and I can even use eSATA if I want to, or
the faster IDE or SATA ports on the SATA PCI upgrade card.
Jon.
[0] As has been noted by pale and should be well known, LVM requires the
whole of a disk/partition upon which a PV is created, and so you need to
at least begin on cylinder 1 when creating partitions. I decided to have
another 1GB here for dumping purposes and my standard layout is similar.
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