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Re: grub with sata drives? - Success



On Tue, Nov 04, 2008 at 08:21:45AM +0530, Raj Kiran Grandhi wrote:
> Thomas H. George wrote:
> >On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 03:00:56PM -0600, elijah rutschman wrote:
> >>On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 2:28 PM, Thomas H. George <lists@tomgeorge.info> 
> >>wrote:
> >>>I have two sata drives, sda and sdb with the root partition on sdb.  I
> >>>installed grub on sdb and made the following entries in
> >>>/boot/grub/menu.lst:
> >>As far as I know, grub doesn't use the Linux /dev/ nodes to access
> >>disks.  The syntax for both IDE and SATA drives should be the same for
> >>your menu.lst, so something along the lines of groot=(hd0,0).  Since
> >>you are using the secondary drive (in Linux, /dev/sdb) I guess it
> >>would probably be groot=(hd1,0).  You'd still want kopt=root=/dev/sdb1
> >>as it is though, since that parameter is intended for the kernel and
> >>not the bootloader.
> >>
> >>-Elijah
> >>
> >Well groot=(hd2,0) works - that is, when trying to boot I now get a
> >message:
> >
> >root  (hd2,0)
> >  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
> >kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-amd64 root=/dev/sdb1 ro
> >
> >Error 15: File not found
> 
> Is your /boot on a separate partition?
> 
> Please post more information on your partition layout. At the very least 
> mention the partition of your /boot and the total number of disks in 
> your system. You mentioned having two SATA drives, but do you also have 
> any IDE drives?
> 
> The 'groot=<dev>' line in menu.lst should be commented out with a single 
> '#'. update-grub uses this line to figure out the partition where your 
> /boot is located. If your /boot is on a dedicated partition, then the 
> kernel would be found in the root of that filesystem. So the kernel line 
> should read:
> 
> kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-amd64 root=/dev/sdb1
> 
> If you are able to get to a grub prompt while booting, you can manually 
> specify the kernel and vmlinuz and use <tab> for autocomplete.
> 
> At the grub prompt, press 'c' to get to the console.
> 
> type root (hd<tab>
> 
This command I had found before and the result was hd0,hd1,hd2.  I have
three hard drives, one ide and two sata.  In BIOS MAIN they are
identified as Primary IDE Master, Sata 1 and Sata 3 (Sata 2 is an
optical drive).  In the distant past the IDE drive contained Windoz but
I reformated it as ext3 for data storage.  Sata 1 has a vfat partition
with some Windoz data files and a ext3 partition with an earlier Debian
installation.  Sata 3 has a single ext3 partition with my current Debian
installation, Lenny.

> that should list all the drives. Select the appropriate number, and 
> press <tab> to list the paritions. Select the partition that makes most 
> sense.
> 
> type 'kernel /<tab>' and use tabcompletion to point grub to the correct 
> kernel and initrd.
> 
This command - which I had not used before - provided the solution to
the mystery.  After setting root (hd0,0) the result of kernel /<tab>
produced information known to be on Sata 1!  Why?  In BIOS Boot Hard
Drives I had set the sequence as Sata 3, IDE, Sata 1 and grub was using
this order, not the order in BIOS MAIN.  Therefore the correct entry for
groot has to be (hd0,0).  

Once you know its obvious, right?

Thanks for putting me on the right track.

Tom

> Once you have all the needed info, you can modify menu.lst appropriately.
> 
> good luck.
> 
> -- 
> 
> If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
>                                        -- Albert Einstein
> 
> 
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