BIOS problem?

[Les Mikesell]

Karl Larsen wrote:

>> 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.

Its not unusual for your boot drive to stay first.  For most things 
you'd want to do you can work around this by putting your /boot(s) on 
partitions on the drive your PC natively wants to boot from, but you can 
make the OS root anywhere you want.  For multi-boot systems you may be 
able to put the kernel/initrd's for both versions in the same partition 
with a single grub.conf and entries to choose, or you may want separate 
boot partitions and to reinstall the grub MBR with different root 
options to switch between them.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com