Boot from USB and share SATA drive

[ldi9999]

If I install the system on a USB driver, can I share (samba) the hard drive connected to SATA port? My understanding is when you connect both, the system won't boot because SATA would come first.

[WarheadsSE]

You can, but its no cakewalk.

You'll need to understand how to safely change the rootfs parameter of uboot, and you'll need to know the ramifications of such a change.

[icewewe]

@WarheadSE:

Wouldn't you just be modifying uboot parameters on the SATA drive? Or does the pogo skip SATA if it doesn't find uboot?

[WarheadsSE]

If the magic isn't on the SATA drive, it will want to boot from stage1 & uboot in NAND.

If the drive is prepared as a SATA boot, then just share out a portion

[ldi9999]

WarheadsSE,
Can I boot from USB drive without attaching the SATA drive and then connect SATA after boot to share?
Thanks.

[WarheadsSE]

You can try that.

[mota37]

I would like to look into this further. I would like to boot USB and only run the when access by Samba. I installed using the guide. Am I correct in thinking I need to install Uboot based on the instructions in the [How-To] Boot Entirely from SATA, then reconfigure Uboot to point to my USB drive?


I have been running my pro since last July 24/7. I recently decided to do something about the disk spinning night and day. After installing hdparm I could only get the drive to spin down for about 1 second, even after following a dozen guides on how to stop programs from accessing the HD frequently. My drive now has 9700 hours spinning and 1.5MILLION load counts which is more than twice it's rated life.

[karog]

@mota37, one thing you could do is boot from USB with the SATA disk powered off. After boot, turn the SATA disk power on and then mount it. It wont automount but with this command you can recognize it ie have it show up as a /dev/sdX device.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'echo "0 0 0" > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan')
Then you can mount it.

Kind of a pain but if you do not reboot often it might be workable.

[Socaltom]

Have you tried HD-idle? Its in the repository. I've read a comment that said you should set the drive parameters to noatime,nodiratime for it to be effective.

Also, this is a good read on disk drive life expectancy. it an article google wrote about their actual drive life expectancy.
http://static.googleusercontent.com/ext ... ilures.pdf

I also have a sata drive that's been on for over 10000 hours. The life expectancy for these things is well over 10,000 operating hours. Mine has an annual failure rate of 0.32% per year assuming 2500 hours of operation per year, but after reading google's paper, I think that if the drive survives the first 3 months, the failure rate is even less than that.

Google didn't see a big correlation between run time and elevated failure rates, but there stuff is on most of the time.
Tom

[mmoalem]

how about installing grub on the sata drive and configuring it to boot from sdb? not sure if and how it can be done but assuming it is possible...