At Tue, 20 Jul 2010 17:38:32 -0400 (EDT) CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
On Tue, 20 Jul 2010 at 11:34am, Dave wrote
Thanks for all the discussion, but keyboard is not the issue.
I guess I should edit the bios settings and look for a way to tell it "hey, you've only got one disk now, be happy."
All Dell desktops I've dealt with (including the Precision T3400 I use now) require you to go into the BIOS and explicitly tell you which busses (IDE before, SATA now) have disks attached to them. If you don't tell it about a disk you do have, the disk won't appear to the OS. And if you do tell it about a disk you don't have, then the boot will hang complaining about a missing disk. It's asinine and I've never seen any other BIOS like it. But it's consistent. I've never dealt with Dell's server hardware, so I have on idea if they do the same thing there (dear God I hope not).
'Little' Dell PowerEdge servers with plain (non-RAID) SATA disks appearently work that way too (same BIOS stupidity I guess). Once they see a disk, they assume it will *always* be there. If you pull the disk for some reason (disk failure for example), it complains about a missing disk. *I* didn't bother looking in the BIOS to shut it up, since I planned on replacing the missing disk in a week or so anyway (just a matter of waiting on WD and UPS...)
In any case, yes, you must go into the BIOS and explicitly enumerate your disks there.