I bought a used Dell business PC, which unusually was dual
boot (2 linux distros). I assumed it was one disto on each
hard drive with grub on one of the drives. I removed the
hard drives and neither boots in another PC. Hence I look
for culprit and found grub was on a 32 GB msata drive that
is size of a postage stamp flat on mobo. So fook, why would
somebody do that? Waste of 31 GB and does it speed up boot
by a poofteenth of a second?

On 2023-04-19 03:58, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> I bought a used Dell business PC, which unusually was dual
> boot (2 linux distros). I assumed it was one disto on each
> hard drive with grub on one of the drives. I removed the
> hard drives and neither boots in another PC. Hence I look
> for culprit and found grub was on a 32 GB msata drive that
> is size of a postage stamp flat on mobo. So fook, why would
> somebody do that? Waste of 31 GB and does it speed up boot
> by a poofteenth of a second?
>

Probably because the install software found that disk first, which was
put there by the vendor. That size maybe indicates the machine was
intended as a diskless station somewhere, then next owner put two real
disks and forgot about the other one.

Just a wild guess.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 19-04-2023 11:06, Carlos E.R. wrote:
> On 2023-04-19 03:58, Nomen Nescio wrote:
>> I bought a used Dell business PC, which unusually was dual
>> boot (2 linux distros). I assumed it was one disto on each
>> hard drive with grub on one of the drives. I removed the
>> hard drives and neither boots in another PC. Hence I look
>> for culprit and found grub was on a 32 GB msata drive that
>> is size of a postage stamp flat on mobo. So fook, why would
>> somebody do that? Waste of 31 GB and does it speed up boot
>> by a poofteenth of a second?
>>
>
> Probably because the install software found that disk first, which was
> put there by the vendor. That size maybe indicates the machine was
> intended as a diskless station somewhere, then next owner put two real
> disks and forgot about the other one.
>
> Just a wild guess.
>
>
Some laptops (like mine) were made with such a small SSD disk and a HDD.
This small SSD was used to speed up booting of Windows. After putting
in a new SSD and converting to Linux, I used this only for temporary
storage of downloaded temporary stuff.

On 4/19/2023 7:38 AM, jjb wrote:
> On 19-04-2023 11:06, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>> On 2023-04-19 03:58, Nomen Nescio wrote:
>>> I bought a used Dell business PC, which unusually was dual
>>> boot (2 linux distros). I assumed it was one disto on each
>>> hard drive with grub on one of the drives. I removed the
>>> hard drives and neither boots in another PC. Hence I look
>>> for culprit and found grub was on a 32 GB msata drive that
>>> is size of a postage stamp flat on mobo. So fook, why would
>>> somebody do that? Waste of 31 GB and does it speed up boot
>>> by a poofteenth of a second?
>>>
>>
>> Probably because the install software found that disk first, which was put there by the vendor. That size maybe indicates the machine was intended as a diskless station somewhere, then next owner put two real disks and forgot about the other one.
>>
>> Just a wild guess.
>>
>>
> Some laptops (like mine) were made with such a small SSD disk and a HDD.  This small SSD was used to speed up booting of Windows.  After putting in a new SSD and converting to Linux, I used this only for temporary storage of downloaded temporary stuff.
>

In Windows, that "thing" can be handled by the Intel RST RAID driver.

https://www.dell.com/community/Storage-Drives-Media/XPS8700-32Gb-SATA-SSD/td-p/4461683

Presumably in Linux, there's no equivalent automatically sniffing
for that possibility, so it is instantiated as two drives JBOD style.

And the reason this happened, is the enumeration of the drives
by the BIOS was probably screwed in the head, GRUB chose to stick
its kit on the wrong drive. The user who set it up that way,
was not being devious, and GRUB figured this out on its own.
Since BLKIDs can be used for setup, it does not matter that
the partitions are on multiple drives, to get Linux to run.

I'm not sure how I'd try to control that, if I was doing an install.
It's possible the 32GB drive cannot be controlled from BIOS level
(Linux will just turn the drive back on). It may in fact, be damn
hard to keep GRUB off that disk :-)

Paul

On 2023-04-19 14:48, Paul wrote:
> On 4/19/2023 7:38 AM, jjb wrote:
>> On 19-04-2023 11:06, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>>> On 2023-04-19 03:58, Nomen Nescio wrote:
>>>> I bought a used Dell business PC, which unusually was dual
>>>> boot (2 linux distros). I assumed it was one disto on each
>>>> hard drive with grub on one of the drives. I removed the
>>>> hard drives and neither boots in another PC. Hence I look
>>>> for culprit and found grub was on a 32 GB msata drive that
>>>> is size of a postage stamp flat on mobo. So fook, why would
>>>> somebody do that? Waste of 31 GB and does it speed up boot
>>>> by a poofteenth of a second?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Probably because the install software found that disk first, which
>>> was put there by the vendor. That size maybe indicates the machine
>>> was intended as a diskless station somewhere, then next owner put two
>>> real disks and forgot about the other one.
>>>
>>> Just a wild guess.
>>>
>>>
>> Some laptops (like mine) were made with such a small SSD disk and a
>> HDD.  This small SSD was used to speed up booting of Windows.  After
>> putting in a new SSD and converting to Linux, I used this only for
>> temporary storage of downloaded temporary stuff.
>>
>
> In Windows, that "thing" can be handled by the Intel RST RAID driver.
>
> https://www.dell.com/community/Storage-Drives-Media/XPS8700-32Gb-SATA-SSD/td-p/4461683
>
> Presumably in Linux, there's no equivalent automatically sniffing
> for that possibility, so it is instantiated as two drives JBOD style.

Yes, there is, but as far as I know, no installer that installed that
way, being more or less experimental. I don't remember offhand the name
in Linux. I think there were two technologies.

>
> And the reason this happened, is the enumeration of the drives
> by the BIOS was probably screwed in the head, GRUB chose to stick
> its kit on the wrong drive. The user who set it up that way,
> was not being devious, and GRUB figured this out on its own.
> Since BLKIDs can be used for setup, it does not matter that
> the partitions are on multiple drives, to get Linux to run.
>
> I'm not sure how I'd try to control that, if I was doing an install.
> It's possible the 32GB drive cannot be controlled from BIOS level
> (Linux will just turn the drive back on). It may in fact, be damn
> hard to keep GRUB off that disk :-)

That's up to the installation utility. In openSUSE, you just have to
specify the device.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 4/20/2023 1:23 PM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

>
> That's up to the installation utility. In openSUSE, you just have to specify the device.
>

Those two drives have RAID metadata on them now, so there's
a whole book you could write about fixing it properly.

This is not entirely an OpenSUSE issue. It's a BIOS hygiene issue.

A number of Dells have "bad BIOS behavior" regarding switched-on ports,
and this is due to the Dell fixation with "RAID-ready behavior". Dell users
(I have a refurb), pay a heavy price for this crapola.

In the past, the sage advice was to remove the 32GB device,
and switch the BIOS to AHCI mode for the remaining drive.
The remaining drive could be a cheap SSD you pick up at the
computer store, which would have better all-round performance
than that two-drive-kludge. With one drive in the computer,
chances are, GRUB goes on the correct disk.

Paul