[gPXE] Change drive number of the iscsi boot drive?

[Shao Miller]

On 1/18/2011 10:42, Binh Thai wrote:
> Hello Everyone,

Hello.

>
> It seems by default the iscsi boot drive initiated from gPXE has the 
> drive number 0.

I think that you meant to type "BIOS drive 0x80" rather than "drive 
number 0".  BIOS drive 0x00 would be the first floppy disk drive.

> Is there any way to change this drive number to an arbitrary number? 
> The reason is I want to keep the drive order and numbers of the 
> internal hard drives intact.

If you wish to change the drive number away from 0x80, what are you 
hoping to do with it?  Boot it?  I am under the impression that a lot of 
HDD boot-loader code expects to be run from drive 0x80.

gPXE assigns a "natural" drive number to the SAN; the "natural" number 
would be the next number available.  If you had 0x80 and 0x81 already, 
then it would get 0x82.  But then gPXE swaps that with the real 0x80 
just for booting purposes, since 0x80 is traditionally the booting HDD.  
See gpxe/src/arch/i386/interface/pcbios/int13.c for some relevant source 
code.

- Shao Miller
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