On 04/07/12 16:41, Gary Roach wrote:
If the BOIS ATA/IDE Configuration is set to Extended, the bios finds my CDROM drive but not the hard drive. If the configuration is set to Legacy the bios finds the hard drive but not my CDROM drive. The hard drive is on IDE -1 as master (or stand alone, makes no difference) and the CDROM is on IDE-2 as master. Swapping cables didn't help. The two units are mounted too far apart to make one master and the other slave on the same IDE port.
Assuming that you are planning on booting from the hard drive, set the BIOS so that the hard drive is recognized. The fact that the BIOS does not recognize the existence of the CDROM should not matter. Once it has booted (unless things have changed since I started using linux about 14 years ago) linux does not use the BIOS and should detect the CDROM drive even though the BIOS does not.
Back in the days before I found linux, I had a hard drive that apparently stopped working just because there was a lightning strike on a transformer about 1/4 mile from our trailer while I was booted up and remotely logged into another system. The box would not even boot if the drive was installed and listed in the BIOS setup, even if I was not trying to boot from that drive. I removed the drive, but did not get rid of it because I am a pack-rat.
Then I started using linux and, at some point, decided to see if there was any chance that I could boot into linux with the drive installed, in an attempt to salvage any of the data on the disk. As it turned out, if I listed the drive in the BIOS setup then the system would not boot, but if I did not list the drive then the system would boot just fine from another drive and linux, having booted, ignored the BIOS and found the drive and was able to read everything from it that I wanted. By then, I had recreated, or regenerated any data that I actually needed from the drive, so I did not really need to retrieve any data, but it did give me more available disk space. Disk space is good!
Marc