On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Michael wrote:

> Hello,
>
>> -- Booting from SATA I care not, I will be using the 1.2gig HDD that 
>> was in the machine to boot the kernel then onto the SATA drive :)(any 
>> good references for doing this style of boot?) So that means that any 
>> SATA card should work as OF will not need to boot from it??
>
> I've been using a ZIP drive on my hp300 box in a similar setup for ages 
> ( because the braindead firmware wouldn't probe newer SCSI disks - 
> strange enough it found the ZIP ) - the trick is to hardcode the 
> location your root filesystem into the kernel image: config netbsd root 
> on sd0a type ffs for instance. I always kept two kernels on a ZIP - one 
> with root pointing to the big disk for normal operation, one pointing to 
> the ZIP which contained a minimal NetBSD installation in case I mess up 
> the disk, so I can repair things.
>
> Any SATA card with a supported controller should just work. That's the 
> theory though, in real life there may be platform-specific issues 
> because these things tend to be rather x86-centric so few of the drivers 
> would have been thoroughly tested on anything else. There are people who 
> used such cards in macppc, sparc64 and other PCI machines, better ask 
> around on the respective mailing lists before buying anything. ( if a 
> driver works on sparc64 chances are pretty good it will work on macppc 
> too - same byte order, alignment requirements and so on )

 	If you are using raidframe to mirror or in other ways combine
 	disks you can set it to autoconfigure a root partition. When
 	a kernel loads it will by default pick an autoconfigured root
 	raid partition. Some people setup a raid mirror with only one
 	component to get the same effect without needing the second
 	disk :)

-- 
 		David/absolute       -- www.NetBSD.org: No hype required --