Claude Jones wrote: > On Sat August 18 2007, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: >> I don't know if grub has this problem, but I remember that with >> lilo, you had to tell it if you were booting off a SCSI drive on a >> mixed SCSI/IDE system. It would assume that the IDE drive was mapped >> as the first hard drive by the BIOS. I believe it would have the >> same problem with a system with both SATA and PATA controllers, but >> I never tried it. > > Interesting you mention this today. I just had a machine come in, a Dell > Optiplex 320 desktop which a friend was ready to trash - it happened to be > brand new. The original user had developed some major problem in his Windows > system, and there had been a decision to replace the box and turn the Dell > into a dual boot. It had been partitioned with XP on the first partition, and > Ubuntu loaded on partitions 2-4; Ubuntu wouldn't boot - it was the fourth > distro that had been tried; I googled this specific machine and found a > number of threads about it - it turned out that it has the bottom-of-the line > SATA controller in it and that it had to be booted with the kernel > switch "pci=nomsi" set, and Lilo had to be substituted for Grup (this need > was not well explained, but I did try with just adding the kernel switch > first which didn't work) - when I did those two things and installed again, > the machine came right up - the PATA controller just has an optical disk on > it, to be precise, and is set to be first boot, the SATA drive is second so > this is not the precise issue you raise above - I can't say anything good or > bad about Lilo - it seems to work just fine - there are some who go ballistic > about Grub and insist Lilo is far superior - I don't really know why - Lilo > is still offered as an option with PCLinuxOS and some flavors of Ubuntu and > Debian... > I used LILO for years, and I didn't have problems with it. But I also new how to handle mixed SCSI/IDE systems. There was no problem if the IDE controller only had optical drives, but if it had a hard drive, then lilo would install to the wrong drive if it was a SCSI boot. It is not supposed to have this problem any more, but I have not tested it. I do find that LILO works better when you are installing to a drive that does not have the same BIOS number as it will have when it is booted. For example, I have a system that boots off a PCMCIA hard drive. Because the system does not have a floppy or CD, I did the install on another system. (Actually, I did hte install manually from another Linux system.) The drive was hde on the other system, but is hda when it is booted. So you tell LILO that /dev/hde is BIOS device 80 and install after running chroot to where the drive is mounted. You then remove that line so that LILO will not be confused when you do your next update. After moving the drive to the other machine, it boots fine. With Grub, you have to modify the device map file before running grub-install, and change it back after you install. (You are better off building device.map by hand, instead of letting grub-install do it.) It works, but it is more complicated. But at least with grub, you can tell it where to find the drive if you make a mistake, as long as you remember what partition /boot is. Mikkel -- Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
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