On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 12:58:57AM +0000, Matthew Campbell wrote: > I hope I don't create a fight with this. It's the fighters who create the fights, not those, like you, asking for help :-) > 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. > > 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 has /dev/sdb1 listed as an option, but says the disk does not exist and to load the kernel first, which of course is on the new hard drive partition /dev/sdb1 which I can access just fine after starting the kernel. The catch is that I have to boot the flash drive /dev/sdc1 to do so thus making it the root filesystem. Another possibility, which I haven't yet seen mentioned in this thread: some hard disks take their time to "wake up". I've had to slow down the BIOS of one computer (by fiddling with start up options, like disabling whatever "fast boot" thingy, enabling memory tests) in order to have it find all hard disks ready to play at boot time. That said, best option in this case would be to not use this disk for /boot (or even for /) -- it'll be awake and ready to play by the time userspace takes over (if not, at least you'd have more knobs to tweak there). Cheers -- tomás
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