Booting order / SATA onboard / IDE card

[Alex Beamish]

Hi folks,

My current home NFS server is failing, and I'm working on replacing it
with a new machine, but I'm concerned about the disk boot order on the
new machine.

The original NFS server has IDE drives, with the OS on the smaller,
original drive (primary master) and the two data disks on the primary
slave and secondary slave (it made sense to me to have the two data
drives on separate channels). My motivation to change is that the
secondary channel has been dead on this machine for some time. I can
still get at the files, but I'd like to get things working properly
again.

The intended replacement is a P4 3GHz Dell machine which has a single
80G SATA drive. I was planning on buying two 500G or 1T SATA drives as
the data disks (RAID 1, mirrored), and installing an IDE card for a
small, inexpensive system disk. However, now I'm wondering whether the
BIOS on this new machine will be flexible enough to be able to boot
off the IDE disk; I'm new to SATA drive machines. Anyway, that's plan
A, and my preferred solution.

Plan B would be to leave the original SATA drive where it is in the
new machine, use it as the system disk, and just move the original IDE
data drives over to the new machine. The original NFS server is
running openSolaris and the drives are using ZFS, in case anyone's
curious.

Thoughts? Comments?

-- 
Alex Beamish
Toronto, Ontario
aka talexb
--
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