Alexandre Oliva wrote:
And whether this works or not depends on how the first disk fails, and
how the BIOS assigns disk IDs to the disks. E.g., if the failure in
disk one is such that the disk is still visible to the BIOS, but its
MBR or boot partition got unreadable, your arrangement won't work: you
still won't be able to boot off /dev/sdb. In order for your
arrangement to work, the failure mode has to be such that the BIOS no
longer assigns ID 0x80 to /dev/sda, but rather to /dev/sdb. This may
require tweaking BIOS settings after you replace sda, if it fails.
Agreed. In my experience if the first drive is still detectable but not
functional, you can quickly remedy that by powering down the system,
removing the first drive, then booting. Upon boot it should find the
second drive as /dev/sda.
Chris
