Booting 2nd mirrored boot disk

Linux and Unix-Like Red Hat
1

Hi guys,
thanks for helping out.

If you have two boot disk mirrored and your primary boot disk fails, how will you boot the system from the second disk?

Thank you very much for your assistance on this matter.

Arrey

2

So, a few questions:-

  • What OS and version?
  • What Hardware?
  • Is the server partitioned (LPAR, VMWare, ......) ?

We need something to start with, please?

  • For Solaris, it's boot disk2 or something from the <ok> prompt.
  • For AIX, you pick it in SMS
  • For VMWared RHEL, it's .......

..... so you can see that there is nothing for us to consider yet.

Robin

3

Hello Robin,
thanks for the reply. I appreciate it.

The OS is Rhel 6.4
The Hardware is dell poweredge R610

Thank you kindly

Arrey

4

Great! So what prompts do you get first, so we can tell you how to interrupt.

It may be as simple as pressing ENTER or SPACE at the right moment. We should then be able to guide you through changing the boot flags to read a different disk.

Have you lost your primary boot disk completely or is it corrupted? I ask this, because if there is logical corruption, then you are likely to have copied that to the other disk, but we'll come to that later if need be.

Robin

1 Like
5

Thanks Robin for always taken the time to reply. I have lost the my primary boot disk. The server would not boot at all.

thank you again.

6

Physical disk loss then. Have you tried to boot with the disk physically removed? Some servers will attempt to boot the first disk they find.

What do you get on the console when you power on? There must be some POST messages somewhere as the BIOS / Firmware probes the hardware, then you should get some messages or prompts on the console.

Of course, I'm hoping that it is not a console that is off with the server and takes an age to warm up. From experience, they can be a nightmare.

Any change of a screen shot? Of course, this assumes that you have a remote/virtual console.

Robin

Footnote:

  • POST = Power On Self Test