BIOS problem?

[Karl Larsen]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Karl Larsen wrote:
>
>>>>    I have two hard drives in my computer. I have this F7 on a IDE 
>>>> hard drive and while on this drive it is /dev/sda. No problem now 
>>>> but the second drive is a Serial Cable type and it shows up as 
>>>> /dev/sdf.  No problem with that either.
>>>>
>>>>    It all falls apart when I use the Serial Cable hard drive. It 
>>>> becomes /dev/sda and the IDE becomes /dev/sdb.
>>>
>>> What's installed on the SATA drive?
>>    Soon it will be F7 64 bit new install.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>    I think the BIOS is doing this. Does anyone else have a similar 
>>>> problem?
>>>
>>> I think it's not the BIOS. Linux generally ignores the BIOS for disks.
>>>
>>>
>>    Well then it will be interesting to see what is going on.
>
> Add-on cards sometimes have an option to disable their own bios which 
> you should do if you don't want to boot from them.  Usually if you 
> boot from a drive it remains mapped into the first position but if you 
> don't it will be later in the list.  The motherboard bios may also 
> give you an extensive choice (or not...) about what order to check for 
> bootable devices.  'Dmesg' will show the linux device probe sequence 
> and discovery order, assuming things worked well enough to get that far.
>
    Well it never got that far. But for fun what happened? I rebooted 
into the F7 64 bit installation DVD and I installed the thing. It came 
up just fine but the usual problem with Nvidia, no pointer. I managed to 
get a terminal down and mounted this Linux and found what fixed the 
pointer on this and put it in the new 64 bit machine, rebooted and still 
no pointer.

    Looked with fdisk and sure as heck the SATA drive was /dev/sda. The 
IDE drive was now /dev/sdb. To fix this was major work. I would have to 
change grub and fstab and god only knows what else to make this system 
work as /dev/sdb.

    Now the grub in the F7/64 put the setup in /dev/sdb4 which is very 
odd since it wound up being the first disk.

    After all the strange things I tried to do something right but there 
is no way. I unplugged the SATA drive, went up in rescue CD and reset 
grub to where it was. Now I am back on the well set up IDE hard drive.

    My bios IS weird. The IDE drive is master in the first IDE listing 
or IDE0. The SATA drive is on IDE2 and there is no master slave. This 
made me think the SATA would show up as it used to as /dev/sdf and work 
fine. Well it didn't and I lay the blame square on the BIOS. I can't fix 
this.



-- 

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