Problem booting OS on IDE PCI adaptor card with Grub in MBR of hda

Nigel Henry cave.dnb at tiscali.fr
Wed Jul 12 23:04:29 UTC 2006


On Wednesday 12 July 2006 17:43, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> Nigel Henry wrote:
> > Hi.  I have on my old Gateway 500, 3 harddrives, and 3 ROM drives.
> > hda, and hdb (both harddrives) are on the first IDE controller on the
> > mobo. hdc, and hdd (cdrom, and cdwriter) are on the 2nd IDE controller on
> > the mobo. hde (harddrive) is on the first IDE controller of the PCI
> > adaptor card, and. hdg (dvdrom) is on the 2nd IDE controller of the PCI
> > adaptor card.
> >
> > FC2's (hdb) Grub is in the MBR of hda, (Win ME is on hda).  FC3, and 2
> > instances of FC5 are on other partitions of hda, and hdb, with their Grub
> > bootloaders in their respective / partitions, and I can chainload from
> > Grub in the MBR to these other Grub's, and everyone boots up ok.
> >
> > The problem is with FC1 (hde) on the IDE PCI adaptor card. Again it's 
> > Grub is in FC1's / partition, but I cannot set up a chainloader to it
> > like the other OS's. When I bootup, and select FC1 on Grubs menu, I get a
> > "no such disc" returned. Incidentally I can boot FC1 from a floppy ok,
> > and is the way I've been booting it since 2003.
> >
> > Also when any of the other OS's is booted up, I have no problem with the
> > dvdrom drive, or hde, and can mount it, transfer files back and forth
> > from it, and so on.
> >
> > I saw some posts about Grubs drive map, but there is hardly any info
> > about it on the Grub site. Anyway I looked at the drive map of Grub (in
> > the MBR) and see that it only has 3 entries. fd0, hda, and hdb (no hde).
> > I admit i'm poking around in the dark, but added and entry for hde to the
> > drive map. Rebooted, but still getting a "no such disc" for FC1 on hde.
> >
> > If this missing hde from the drive map is the problem, am I supposed to
> > reinstall Grub to the MBR after making changes to the map?
> >
> > Any help is really appreciated.
> >
> > Nigel.
>
> Yes, you have to run grub-install after updating the drive map. But
> this may not solve the problem. If your BIOS does not know how to
> access the drives on the Silicon Graphics card, and you chainload
> the copy of Grub on the MBR of hde, that first stage tries to use
> the BIOS to load the second stage. The reason the floppy boot works
> is that both the first and second stages are on the floppy, so Grub
> can use its own code to access the drive.
>
> Mikkel

Hi Mikkel. Thanks for explaining how the floppy boot works. From FC2 I 
ran /sbin/grub-install /dev/hda, which was successfull and displayed my 
edited drive map. Rebooted, but still no go, and a "no such disk" when trying 
to boot FC1. Next I booted up Win ME on the basis that at least I can see 
what it says about the card, as I'd used the supplied boot floppy to install 
the drivers on that. According to the device manager there are no problems 
with the card, the only difference from the cards handbook was that the 
handbook said that I would find the card in harddrive controllers, but it was 
actually listed in scsi controllers. Not much help there.

Next I venture into the BIOS. In the boot section the dvdrom (hdg) is listed 
last on the list. Also, all 3 harddrives are showing in the BIOS. 

Running out of ideas here, but thought I'd try to boot from the dvdrom drive, 
and moved it up to before the harddrive. Then tried Knoppix 5.0, but it gave 
me a boot failed. Not being sure if dvdrom drives can boot cdroms I found my 
only dvdrom for mdk 10.1, and tried that. The output from that try was:

Isolinux 1.76 Mandrake Isolinux:
Disk error 01,  AX = 423B, Drive 00
Boot failed: press a key to retry...
Zilch!. Had to hard reset.

I somehow think that this is going to end up going nowhere. I will either have 
to put up with using the floppy for FC1, which Fedora legacy are dropping in 
the next few days, but that's my choice if I want to continue using it. Or I 
can move FC1 to either hda or hdb, which I don't know how to do, and just use 
hde, which is on the IDE PCI adaptor card for backups , and data, as it works 
ok once the system is booted up.

Unless you have any further ideas, I suppose it's a case of "you can't win em 
all" Nigel.
> --
>
>   Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
> for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!




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