Re: Grub cannot see my new hard drive
Matthew Campbell wrote:
> I hope I don't create a fight with this.
It's really much more rare than your recent experience would
suggest.
> I booted the Debian netinst disc and installed Linux on /dev/sdb1 as the root partition. My computer is old. The system BIOS does not see this hard drive, nor does Grub, but the Linux kernel does. I'm running the 4.19.0-9-686-pae kernel, #1 SMP Debian 4.19.118-2 and Buster 10.4.0.
So when the machine powers on, BIOS supplies the first set of
boot instructions. It can't boot off a disk it can't see.
> The installation program tried to set up Grub on /dev/sda, but since Grub cannot see /dev/sdb the system gets stuck in rescue mode. It sees two hard drives hd0 and hd1, but says both have unknown filesystems. I had to install Linux on a 32 GB USB flash drive just to get my computer to boot. Now I can boot Windows again too. The flash drive is _really_ slow.
Grub seeing drives but then thinking they have unknown
filesystems is really weird.
Can you get into the machine's BIOS? Can you check for, say, a
motherboard-supported RAID system being turned on? Or a
non-standard SATA driver, or anything of the sort?
> 2) Can I create a CD or USB flash drive with which to boot the computer so it loads the kernel and mounts /dev/sdb1 as the root file system?
Very likely you can use the USB flash drive you already have and
tell it to chainload Linux on hd1 or Windows on hd0 (or
whatever).
> 3) How long is my flash drive likely to last? Will it wear out as I continue to use it? Will reading from it damage it, or just writing to it?
I had a a flash drive used for something like this
last for three years.
> 4) How exactly does Grub work? What is the process, step by step? How do I configure Grub to do what I want? The installation program seems determined to do everything its own way.
That's big and complicated and worthy of reading the
documentation.
It looks like the Wikipedia article is actually pretty
informative:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_GRUB
-dsr-
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