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November 6, 2005
The Wonderful world of SATA
Non geeks may find nothing of interest here. Consider yourself warned.
One of the drives in my desktop machine started warning me of impending failure a few days back. I had sorta been waiting for it to die - seeing as how it's an IBM Deathstar. I wasn't particularly worried about it, since it houses my home directory (Windows users, think "\\Documents and Settings\\<your user name>") and is part of a software RAID-1 mirror set.
Anyway, I picked up two 300G Serial ATA drives, each about $90 after rebate, and started thinking about the upgrade. My biggest concern was moving my Windows XP install, which I keep around for the (very) occasional game session. I keep the Windows installation on a FAT file system, and during a hardware upgrade I normally just pick it up and move it (boot Linux, move the files, boot the XP cd and fix the boot-loader). I wasn't sure this would work this time, since XP doesn't natively grok SATA.
Turns out my fears were justified. While the BIOS would boot off the SATA drives without a problem, the XP CD didn't see the attached drives, hence no recovery console.
To make matters worse, I don't have a floppy drive on the machine (who needs one?) so I couldn't just create a driver disk. So I ended up having to slipstream the drivers into the XP CD (included SP 2 while I was at it).
I had installed the SATA drivers into my XP install the last time I upgraded motherboards, so I was pretty confident that once I got the installation to boot, all would work itself out. Which it basically did.
Windows is more resilient than Microsoft seems to realize - I've moved my installation around through several hardware upgrades, including changing from an intel SMP machine to a single-CPU AMD Athlon 64.
Not to leave well-enough alone on the Linux side, I decided to play around with logical volume management while I was at it. I just love that my free operating system natively supports (and, at least in Fedora Core 4, will use by default) something that less than 10 years ago cost tens of thousands of dollars and was available only from proprietary UNIX vendors and companies like Veritas.
It took the better part of a day - most of that to migrate the data from the old drives to the new ones. The machine ended up looking like this:
$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/vg0-rootv 15G 5.3G 8.3G 39% / /dev/sda2 99M 16M 79M 17% /boot /dev/shm 500M 0 500M 0% /dev/shm /dev/mapper/vg1-exportvg 299G 62G 222G 22% /export /dev/mapper/vg0-homev 81G 13G 64G 17% /home /dev/sda1 54G 20G 35G 36% /mnt/winxp
Posted by dberger at November 6, 2005 8:06 PM