On 12/27/2011 11:21 AM, Jeffrey Ross wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 2:37 PM, Jeffrey Ross<jeff@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Is there a way to identify which disk the BIOS is using to boot from (eg
>> disk 0 or 1) when I don't have physical access to the system to view the
>> BIOS settings?
> If both disks have identical bootloaders, I'm not sure there's any way
> from a running system to check which one you booted from. If you
> don't mind rebooting it, you could add a different arbitrary kernel
> argument to the GRUB configuration of each disk's bootloader, reboot
> the machine, then check /proc/cmdline to see which one shows up.
In this case it turns out it was booting off of sda (which is what I
suspected), I ended up taking a ride down to the datacenter and verifying
the BIOS.
The original question although no longer important remains, can you tell
which disk the initial load occurred from? I did run dmidecode and found
nothing of value.
There is a way to determine things remotely, if you do some setup
beforehand.
Your two hard drives are otherwise (I presume) exactly alike.
Set them up similarly, *except* that both use all but a megabyte or so
(or one cylinder's worth of blocks). Make that little extra into a
partition on ONE of the disks.
You can then remotely use 'cat /proc/partitions' to show the attached
drives and partition sizes (or use 'sfdisk -uC -l').
The extra partition will denote which drive is being used as 'sda' or
'sdb'. This method is independent of the contents of the disk.
You may be able to re-size both of them in place although it might
require another site visit. I have NO idea if gparted can be made to
work remotely with vnc etc.
Geoff
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