Maximum PC

I installed Fedora Core 3 to a scsi hard drive. The bios cant boot from it. Is there a way to make a linux boot disk that loads the driver scsi driver, and then boots from the scsi drive? (i do not have an IDE drive connected, and would rather boot from removable media) any suggestions?

You have to tell the boot loader (GRUB or LILO) where to boot from. I'm assuming that you have the proper driver for your SCSI card, the best thing you can do is to check is if your SCSI card is supported by checking out the Hardware Compatibility LIst of the distro you are using.

I didn't see a hardware compatibility list in Fedora's website, so check under the Redhat website:

http://hardware.redhat.com/hcl/

I was actually able to install FC3 on the scsi hard drive. The problem is that i can not boot from it, it is a pci scsi card, not on my mobo. Just before it boots into the gui install, it says someting like "loading [scsi driver name]" and in the setup, it "sees" the hard drive. How can i make it so, i can boot grub from a floppy/cd and then grub will boot linux off this drive. I need the driver for the card, but i dont know how to get it either, becasue it loads automatically. thanks

You can run mkbootdisk from a command prompt...but that's assuming you can boot into there to do that.

Beyond that you'll be loading from a CD, manaully putting the scsi drives and then mounting the drive and starting X from there. You won't be using grub at all at that point.

What DJ said is right, you really want to be dealing with what's in your grub.conf to boot to that HD..is there a specific reason you don't want to do that??

well..in short...because I am a noob and i dont know what i'm doing. Lest say this. I have a scsi external hard drive, connected by PCI card. I want to install FC3 on it, and be able to boot w/o an IDE hard drive. what can I do? The bios doesnt "see" the drive becuase it is connected by pci card, this is why i can not directly boot from it. how can i boot to the scsi drive?

There should be a bios setting along the lines of try other boot devices...might not be a bad idea to make sure there isn't some firmwhere settings somewhere on that card you have to set so it does boot.

Reguardless of the drives not being seen in the bios, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to boot with that adapter card

You did load the SCSI drivers during the install right??

you cant boot from the scsi drive if you have a pci scsi controller. same with any other hard drive controller. say...you go buy a PCI pata raid card. then you connect the hard drives to the card. you wouldnt be able to see the drives from the bios. same with this drive. you need to load the drivers from OS level, so that the OS can see the drives.

heres what i did, exactly.
1)booted from FC3 cd.
2) it automatically loaded into the gui install
3)it had already loaded the scsi card drivers itself, and could see the scsi drive
4)was able to install to the scsi drive
5)the FC3 "recovery feature" (just a shell loaded from the CD) could see the scsi drive and FC3 install (after it automatically loaded the scsi card drivers)

what can i do from here to make it so that I can boot from this drive. when I am at this recovery shell, i cant run "startx" it says commmand not found

suggestions?

anyone?

That is not true, actually. You certainly can boot from a PCI card ... whether RAID, SCSI, or other.

When your PC boots, it first runs through the motherboard's BIOS ... and you're right, at this point, it won't 'see' the drives attached to the card; it will only see the card itself.

The next step, however, is to launch the CARD's bios, which happily detects and configures the drives attached to the card. After this step, it will proceed to launch the OS.

I can see two possible problems.

There might be a problem with your boot loader's configuration. If the boot loader is not looking for a scsi card, or if it is not configuring it properly, it won't be able to boot from that drive. If you cut and paste your boot loader's config file, we might be able to find the problem (assuming it exists).

The second possible problem is that your SCSI driver's may be loaded into the kernel as a module, rather than built directly into the kernel itself. Modules are located on /root ... and if /root is on the SCSI drive ... well, you have a problem! In other words ... the SCSI module won't be inserted into the kernel until after the kernel looks for the boot drive ... which it can't do because it doesn't have the SCSI module loaded. So .. make sure that your drivers are compiled directly into the kernel and NOT being inserted as modules.

Hope this helps.