On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 12:42 PM, Stan Hoeppner <stan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Mark Knecht put forth on 7/3/2010 2:21 PM: > >> Note two things: >> >> 1) All the drives are always reported by BIOS at boot time. Now, that >> doesn't guarantee that the drives spin up. It may only mean they can >> be read by BIOS, but they are there as far as I can tell. They show up >> in the boot screens and in BIOS itself if I drop in to play with >> settings. > > I missed that. I thought I read it was both. My bad. > Not a problem. It's good to be as clear as possible for all involved. >> QUESTION: There are some settings in BIOS for delaying the drive. (Or >> something. I'm using the machine and not in BIOS) There were settings >> from 0 to 35 seconds if I remember correctly. Possibly I should try >> setting each drive to a different value to different value to stagger >> power up? > > If that PSU meets published specs you shouldn't need delayed spin up with > those 5 drives. > I've not dropped into BIOS yet as the machine is in use but from the Asus manual it appears the delay is not on a drive by drive basis so I don't think I can do much there. >> If you need more info or have other ideas please let me know. > > Your answers here should have pretty much eliminated hardware issues as the > cause, unless that particular mobo has BIOS or other issues I'm unaware of. > > I've found it's always best to ask about hardware with this kind of report > just to eliminate possibilities. All that gear is good quality stuff. If the > problem is due to hardware, it's because one of your components is defective, > but we don't see evidence of that at this point. > > Also, TTBOMK, if a SATA drive motor doesn't spin up, the drive firmware won't > report the drive as ready upstream, thus the BIOS won't list the drive. An off-list response suggested possibly setting some drive jumpers on non-boot drives to power up in standby. Apparently the kernel will then spin up those drives later? If I cannot stagger the drives in BIOS then I will likely try that. Technically I guess I only need /boot on sda to get the kernel booted. The mdadm RAID1 on sda/sdb/sdc could start slightly later, and technically the RAID0 on sdd/sde could start very late as there are only VMWare images on that drive. Cheers, Mark -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
