Alternative booting

[Karl Larsen]

Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> Tim wrote:
>   
>>>     If I take the other hard drive clear out this hard drive immediately 
>>> becomes hd0 and grub is not working. It can't find hd1 :-)
>>>       
>> This sort of thing tends to be because someone doesn't understand how
>> GRUB orders the drives (the first one is hd0, the second hd1, etc.), and
>> it doesn't care where they're connected.  Yet, when someone installs
>> GRUB, they use a different scheme (/dev/hda or /dev/sda) and installs it
>> to the other drive, or points it to get its second stage files at the
>> other drive (inside the /boot/ partition), without realising it.
>>
>> On systems that have removable drives, it really helps if whatever's hd0
>> is always going to be considered the first drive, and you put all the
>> GRUB stuff on it.  This may mean changing BIOS boot orders so that
>> things like USB drives are later in the boot order.
>>
>>     
> One other thing that can mess up grub is if you tell the BIOS to
> boot from another drive. This can change the drive ordering that the
> BIOS reports. For example, if I boot normally, my internal hard
> drive is hd0, but if I boot off a USB drive, then that drive is hd0.
>
> I don't know if grub has this problem, but I remember that with
> lilo, you had to tell it if you were booting off a SCSI drive on a
> mixed SCSI/IDE system. It would assume that the IDE drive was mapped
> as the first hard drive by the BIOS. I believe it would have the
> same problem with a system with both SATA and PATA controllers, but
> I never tried it.
>
> Mikkel
>   
    Grub is bad period! I used a rescue cd and when up I typed grub and 
it came up after a while and I typed this:

grub> root (hd1,5)

it said it was a linux partition

grub> setup (hd1)

here it wrote out a lot of things that included that it was putting 
stage 1 on (hd1). I assumbed wrong that grub would use stage 1 on (hd1) 
but it refuses to use it!

    Grub will not ever boot from a stage 1 on (hd1) period.

To get grub to work I will have to put a stage 1 on the new (hd0) hard 
drive. What a stupid system!


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.