Andrew Smith said: > Hi there, > I've had a bit of a read around about this but I'm > not 100% sure what the problem actually is, so in a > hope that someone else has seen the same problem, > it is: > > I have a motherboard with a failed IDE0 but IDE1 is > fine. > > After the failure I rearranged everything and then > installed W2K so I could again use the windows stuff > that I on occasion require since the failure killed > the original IDE0 master drive data which was also > windoze > > Next I bought a IDE RAID Sil0680 card and couldn't > get that to do anything properly - w2k needed a > driver and my paragon partition backup/manager > program didn't detect the drives on the RAID > controller (that's part of how I do drive drive > imaging and resizing to new larger drives) > Grub also wouldn't boot > > Next I got a different brand IDE RAID card that > turned out also to be Sil0680 but this time the > paragon program could see all the drives > But Grub couldn't boot > > Finally I got a non-RAID Sil0680 and still Grub > couldn't boot > > I played with grub but couldn't get my RH9 to boot > so I decided to do a reinstall to see if that > could work out the correct grub settings > > I did a fedora install and it seemed to be happy > with everything, but when I got to rebooting only > W2K showed up (the grub MBR was not even on the > BIOS HDD-0 W2K drive) > > I also tried grub-install to the W2K drive (after > saving the boot block) and grub just says "GRUB" > at boot time. > > The setup is: > Motherboard IDE0 master/slave nothing but still enabled > > Motherboard IDE1 master is a Panasonic DVD drive > Motherboard IDE1 slave is a HDD with Win2K > > Card IDE0 master linux /boot, / and swap > Card IDE0 slave extra drive with 1 ext3 and 1 fat > > Card IDE1 master/slave nothing > > When I boot linux recover > Card IDE0 master is hda > Card IDE0 slave is hdb > Motherboard IDE1 master is hdg > Motherboard IDE1 slave is hdh > > So it looks like under Linux the drives > start with the IDE Card and then the Motherboard (weird) > > The fedora install put the MBR into hda but I can't boot > hda, only hdh (which the BIOS calls HDD-0) > > If I "grub-install /dev/hdb" it says the BIOS doesn't > know the hdb drive but if I "grub-install /dev/hda" > it's happy to do that (and of course it's happy to > do hdh also) > > Any hints, suggestions or ideas greatly appreciated. > I'll look for a "grub" list next if noone here has any > idea, but I thought I'd check here first. > > Any extra command output anyone thinks will help, just > let me know OK - answering my own post - but in case anyone else gets the same problem I didn't 'fix' the problem I found an obvious workaround: I resized the W2K partition so that it was a bit more than 100M smaller, then created an ext2 /boot there on the end. I also made sure the /boot was defined in /etc/fstab by label and also from before / was by label (not sure if that makes any difference) Now the grub.conf says that W2K is hd0,0 and fedora is hd0,1 and that boots fine. So the problem appears to be that the BIOS says that the motherboard IDE1 slave is HDD-0 and the PCI Card IDE0 master/slave is HDD-1/HDD-2 But after W2K or fedora is booted they both say that the PCI Card IDE0 master/slave is hd0/hd1 and that the motherboard IDE1 slave is hd2 I'm not sure if labels are necessary to make the boot work and I don't know at what stage during the boot the hard drive numbers change but I'd guess that is when the driver for the IDE Card is run - I'd guess it might rearrange the drive numbers then. This of course could means that the problem might be anaconda allowing me to put /boot on a drive that the BIOS cannot see (and the grub boot loader cannot see either) -- -Cheers -Andrew MS ... if only he hadn't been hang gliding! -- Shrike-list mailing list Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list
