BIOS problem?

[Karl Larsen]

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.