On 27 April 2015 at 09:48, Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> wrote:
or just grub-install to all drives and configure the bios to attempt to boot from each drive in turn. i haven't seen a BIOS (incl. UEFI) for years that doesn't allow you to specify a boot order.
How does this work when the drive responds initially but then has IO errors? I can understand if the drive presents as offline or fails completely to read the first sector, but once booting starts control has passed to whatever code is run on that first drive. There's nothing running to timeout the boot and proceed to the next drive. Whereas a RAID controller is aware of both drives and will just issue a read from the other drive, a short period after the read doesn't return on the first drive.. In my experience as IT support I've seen heaps of OS drives that will proceed past a linux or windows splash screen, then hang later on in the boot process..