Tim wrote:
oh ye gods, has this become the mailing list for the blind leading the
blind?
David Krings:
I gave up on getting GRUB to behave consistently in my setup. I
squarely blame GRUB for that as there is no reason not to work properly.
Anyhow, what are the other reliable boot options other than a boot
loader installed in MBR?
You can use whatever bootloader you fancy, but you'll probably have to
figure it out for yourself. I think LILO is dead and buried by now, or
at least as far as Fedora is concerned. But that one's sufficiently
fresh in its grave that you could probably find help in using it with
Fedora, if you *reeeeeaaallly* want to.
But I can't see that helping, much. We have no details in David's
message about what the problem really is. Most bootloaders depend on
something in the MBR, so if he's having MBR problems, I can't see
another MBR-dependent bootloader helping.
Karl Larsen:
Hi David, I this morning am having problems with Grub. But I think
the root cause of the problem is my computer's bios setting. Several
years ago I set everything up with all the hard drives using cable
select and it worked.
Now I want to add a new hard drive and Grub has gone bonkers. I was
not able to get it done yet. But I think first I need to go back to
Master Slave which defines for grub which is hd0 and hd1. Right now it
switches and then the dumb thing can't boot.
Master and slave jumpers set the drive to believe that it is a master or
slave. Cable-select does exactly the same thing, except that the
master/slave jumpers are now part of the 40-way IDE cabling. You jumper
the drive to be use cable-select, *then* the drive's master or slave
status is set by which socket on the ribbon lead is plugged into it (one
of them has an open-circuit pin, the other has a short).
I keep seeing all sorts of silly mythologies about what cable-select,
and master and slave drive jumpering does. Use one or the other, and
don't mix the two schemes together, that's about all you need to know
(yes, it's possible to mix them, but you have to be damn sure that you
don't connect and jumper things as if there were two masters or two
slaves). Whichever scheme you're using, if you only have one drive on a
cable, make sure that the unused connector is the one in the middle.
And however many drives you have, make sure the motherboard end on an
80-wire cable, is plugged into the motherboard.
Once the drives are set to be master or slave, the rest of the system
(hardware & software) doesn't give a damn about how it was actually
done. Only the drives, themselves, care which is master and slave, and
they only care which is which, not how it's done.
If I take the other hard drive clear out this hard drive immediately
becomes hd0 and grub is not working. It can't find hd1 :-)
This sort of thing tends to be because someone doesn't understand how
GRUB orders the drives (the first one is hd0, the second hd1, etc.), and
it doesn't care where they're connected. Yet, when someone installs
GRUB, they use a different scheme (/dev/hda or /dev/sda) and installs it
to the other drive, or points it to get its second stage files at the
other drive (inside the /boot/ partition), without realising it.
On systems that have removable drives, it really helps if whatever's hd0
is always going to be considered the first drive, and you put all the
GRUB stuff on it. This may mean changing BIOS boot orders so that
things like USB drives are later in the boot order.
What your saying is the whole thing is bad. Well now I have one hard
drive jumpered for Slave and this is this one. It has to be (h1,5) or
Grub will never boot. The (h0,1) now is an empty linux partition. It is
jumpered for....single or Master. I have no idea how it will work. If
I'm not heard from for many days it didn't work.
--
Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
Linux User
#450462 http://counter.li.org.
