[mythtv-users] Question re: available SATA ports and linux software RAID

[Simon Hobson]

f-myth-users at media.mit.edu wrote:

>     > The onboard BIOS may have trouble with a 3TB boot drive,
>     > but once Linux and sata_mv are loaded, there's nothing in
>     > the device driver to prevent full use of the capacity.
>
>Ok.  (No plans to use such a thing as a boot drive.)  [I'll bet
>the onboard BIOS has never heard of GPT, for one thing, or might
>have addressing limits.]

Booting should be agnostic of how the drive is formatted. The BIOS 
should simply read in the boot sector (1st sector on drive ?) and 
execute whatever it finds there - I imagine there might be some check 
to see if it actually looks like boot code first. After that, the 
loaded code is responsible for reading whatever else it needs. With 
LILO, it had a stiff-coded* list of sectors to read, GRUB is better 
and can understand a number of filesystems.

* The list of sectors containing the code required to boot was 
written into the initial boot code - that's why you had to re-run 
LILO when you fiddled with the boot volume - so this list could be 
updated.

-- 
Simon Hobson

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