nigel henry wrote: > > I'v actually just got FC1 to boot from the main bootloader in hda, but that is > from a kernel entry, not the chainloader. All I get from trying to chainload > is a grub prompt. > > Running /sbin/grub I tried different drives to see if grub> root (hdx,0) would > find somewhere to put FC1's bootloader. grub> root (hd2,0) printed the > following, after also running grub> setup (hd2). > > grub> root (hd2,0) > Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83 > > grub> setup (hd2) > Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes > Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes > Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes > Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd2)"... 15 sectors are embedded. > succeeded > Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd2) (hd2)1+15 p (hd2,0)/boot/grub/stage2 > /boot/grub/grub.conf"... succeeded > Done. > > There's some weird stuff going on here, as (hd2) hdc, is the cdwriter, and > when I ran grub> setup (hd2) the writers light was flickering quite a bit, > but as you can see from the output above, the bootloader installed ok. > The CD is not a hard drive. Grub does not care about the interface, just about the BIOS numbering. A SCSI hard drive would also show up as (hdx). For that matter, my SATA hard drive is (hd0) under Grub, and /dev/sda under Linux. > Another thing that is a bit weird, is that the kernel entries in grub.conf, > apart from the latest from fedora legacy show a strange entry after label=/. > Again, as below. > LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi (perhaps this has something to do with Win ME > identifying the IDE PCI adaptor card as a scsi controller) > > I've never seen that before. > NO, it is using SCSI emulation for the CD-ROM drive, so that you can access it as a SCSI CD. This used to be used a lot with CD writers. FC1 is probably old enough that it still needs it. I don't remember what version of the kernel/cdrecord let you use the IDE command set to control a CD writer. > Quite what the situation is with the cdwriter now, I don't know. It wasn't > showing up in the mobo's BIOS before. Only the cdrom drive (hdd), and the > dvdrom (hdg) which I couldn't boot a distro from were there. > > As I can boot an FC1 kernel from the main bootloader, the harddrive on the IDE > PCI adaptor card is obviously accessable, but there is obviously some problem > with the BIOS regarding drive ID's. Webmin on FC1 still shows the harddrive > on the IDE PCI adaptor card as IDE device E, and yet the mobo's BIOS is > identifying this same harddrive as hdc. > > Anyway, the only problem left now is accessing the Grub menu. I've been back > into FC1, and changed the splashimage from (hd4,0) to (hd2,0), but still only > get the Grub prompt when trying to chainload to (hd2,0) hdc1, aka hde1. > > Nigel. > One thing to keep firmly in mind is that the /dev/hdx device entries are not the same as the BIOS hard drive or Grub numbering. As far as the BIOS is concerned, the first hard drive it finds is device 80, then second one 81, and so on. It gets interesting when you have both SCSI and IDE drives in the same system, because if the system is set to boot off the SCSI controller, then the first SCSI drive will be BIOS 80, Grub (hd0). Also, if you tell the BIOS to boot off a hard drive other then the first one, the numbering changes. I have not checked into it, but it would be interesting to see how the drives are numbered when you boot off of a USB drive. Mikkel -- Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
