John writes:
I am trying to install via the 2/20/05 sarge netinstall. The installation goes fine, but upon reboot I am getting "error loading operating system" I have taken notice that durring the grub installation step, grub is installed to /dev/hda0, which is my secondary hard drive on my primary IDE controller. Durring the partition steps I choose my partitions on /dev/sda0. If I remove the IDE hard drive and install everything goes fine and I can boot the system, but upon hooking the IDE hard drive back up my system will no longer boot because my debian system is not located at (hd0,0).. How can I fix the net install so grub is installed to the mbr of my SATA drive and not my IDE drive? Should this hard deive not be hooked up to my primary IDE controller? I have an open raid controller that it can be hooked into instead, If I remember correctly (its been a while since I did my last windows install) in order to get my SATA hard drive to be listed as the c: I had to install windows to it and add the IDE hard drive later. Any help would be appreciated, thanks. P.S. my motherboard is an Asus K8V SE Deluxe.
+++++++++++++++++++++++ Greetings new installer! I don't use grub except I have an ASUS A8V. The RAID IDE connector has not been activated on the Promise RAID unless you use a special patch to the kernel so don't use the RAID IDE. That would be hde and hdf if the patch was applied. There should be an easier way. VIA primary IDE should be /dev/hda and /dev/hdb with the secondary IDE of /dev/hdc and /dev/hdd. The VIA SATA is /dev/sda and /dev/sdb unless the Promise controller is enabled in the BIOS and then the Promise SATA is /dev/sda and /dev/sdb with the VIA being /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd. :-P Now, the grub could always be installed to the first drive recognized by the BIOS known as the c: drive (currently your PATA) and then told to boot the SATA drive. Next, the drives can be reordered inside the BIOS to change what drive is recognized as first or not. Look in the BOOT section of the BIOS for the Boot Device Priority or similar listing. The /dev/ order is fixed in Linux while the boot order can be changed in the BIOS. This is the same way used to make the computer boot a CDROM. If you have many drives and change the boot order frequently then maybe grub could be used on several drives. (I am making this up.) My last idea is to toggle the boot flag for the disk using fdisk or similar program in Linux. The BIOS might skip the PATA disk if there are no bootable partitions and go to the SATA. That would depend on if you want to dual boot or exactly what is on the PATA. Also, be sure the BIOS has Plug-n-Play OS = NO or the BIOS will defer to the OS and nothing gets initialized consistently. Maybe somebody else can explain grub because I can't. Good Luck- editor@postscript.port5.com --AMD Athlon64 @2.4Ghz Corsair TwinX1024-3200XL @480Mhz DDR ASUS A8V Deluxe ASUS Radeon A9250Ge/Td/256 Creative SB Live WD Raptor SATA Maxtor PATA IBM/Okidata Color PostScript3 Lexmark Mono PostScript2 Debian GNU/Linux debian-amd64/pure64 sid Kernel 2.6.11 XFree86 4.3.0.1 Xorg X11R6.8.2 1.5 Mb DSL