Alternative booting

[Karl Larsen]

David Krings wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
>> 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.
>
> It stops at the grub> prompt. And the board is brand new and not out 
> for that long that I'd call it old.
> I also don't consider a SATA RAID on an nVidia controller as exotic. 
> Those things are on tons of mobos from at least a dozen vendors.
>
>>> 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.
>
> BIOS sees them as one drive. A working F7 sees them as two drives and 
> as one under the /mapper dir.
> I could see this to be a BIOS problem if nothing loads, but GRUB does 
> load at least so far as that it gets to the grub> prompt. So it is not 
> that BIOS is confused. It is purely a GRUB issue.
>
>
> David
>
>
    Exactly. I am going to see if it is a kernel problem. Grub really 
did work on FC6 and that might have been because it has a different 
kernel. I have the last good old kernel still bootable on this f7 and 
will try it later.

-- 

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