BIOS problem?
Karl Larsen
k5di at zianet.com
Sat Oct 20 22:51:47 UTC 2007
Les Mikesell wrote:
> 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 you missed the hard part. If I have both hard drives turned on this
IDE becomes like magic the second hard drive. And all my stuff in the
control files are bad and must be changed to /dev/sdb. This can be done
but it sure was not planned to be done.
--
Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
Linux User
#450462 http://counter.li.org.
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