Alternative booting

[Les Mikesell]

David Krings wrote:

> OK, two things: I did not change any BIOS mapping or drive or boot 
> sequence. I install F7, GRUB installs fine, GRUB boots fine, I install 
> updates => GRUB is broken beyond repair.

How is it failing?  It may be that your update kernel is just in
a location your bios can't load.  This used to be common in old bios 
versions that couldn't go past 1024 cylinders and is probably possible 
again with more exotic drive configurations.

> I did remove drives in order to get F7 to install at all and yes, I 
> added those drives on later, BUT even after doing that GRUB booted fine. 
> It is just that after updating the system the whole shebang comes apart 
> for no good reason. GRUB just ought to continue booting from the same 
> drive and same partition it booted from before...and it just doesn't do 
> that.
> 
> Also, I do not have plain simple IDE drives, but a RAID array on the 
> nVidia SATA controller that I want to use to boot from. In that case, 
> when I specify a hdx device it will write the boot loader to only one of 
> the drives of the mirror array, which doesn't do any good.

If bios sees the drives as separate things, then that's how you have to 
install grub, since it has to call bios to load the kernel.  On a real 
hardware raid, bios will only see the array.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com