Ed Kim wrote: > > Good advice, but regarding the question if the SATA drive isn't listed > as a boot device in the BIOS, AFAIK it wouldn't prevent the MBR from > being written to the SATA drive. As long as your configured your GRUB > to be installed on the SATA drive MBR during install, it shouldn't > matter if it was set as the boot drive in the BIOS at that time. > The problem is not that the SATA is listed as a boot device or not. It is that the BIOS device number is different when it is the boot device. The device.map file that Grub uses when it does the install has to match the configuration that Grub will be booting under. So do the numbers in the grub.conf file. Unless you tell it otherwise, in a case where you booted off of /dev/hda Grub is going to map that as hd0. In this case, the IDE drive is hd0 and the SATA drive is hd1. But when you change it so that the SATA drive is the boot drive, then it is hd0. Remember, Grub has to use BIOS mapping of drives in stage 1. Once stage 2 (or stage 1.5) is loaded, it can access the file system, but because stage 1 must fit in the MBR, it ends up being dumb. So the device.map file used during install must match the configuration that Grub will be booting under. It does make sense for things to work this way most of the time. It lets you install more then one OS on the same drive. You can chain boot loaders with a second boot loader on the second drive. It is only when you are planning on changing drive order after the install that you need to do some extra work to make things boot correctly. Mikkel -- Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
