On Sat August 18 2007, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: > I don't know if grub has this problem, but I remember that with > lilo, you had to tell it if you were booting off a SCSI drive on a > mixed SCSI/IDE system. It would assume that the IDE drive was mapped > as the first hard drive by the BIOS. I believe it would have the > same problem with a system with both SATA and PATA controllers, but > I never tried it. Interesting you mention this today. I just had a machine come in, a Dell Optiplex 320 desktop which a friend was ready to trash - it happened to be brand new. The original user had developed some major problem in his Windows system, and there had been a decision to replace the box and turn the Dell into a dual boot. It had been partitioned with XP on the first partition, and Ubuntu loaded on partitions 2-4; Ubuntu wouldn't boot - it was the fourth distro that had been tried; I googled this specific machine and found a number of threads about it - it turned out that it has the bottom-of-the line SATA controller in it and that it had to be booted with the kernel switch "pci=nomsi" set, and Lilo had to be substituted for Grup (this need was not well explained, but I did try with just adding the kernel switch first which didn't work) - when I did those two things and installed again, the machine came right up - the PATA controller just has an optical disk on it, to be precise, and is set to be first boot, the SATA drive is second so this is not the precise issue you raise above - I can't say anything good or bad about Lilo - it seems to work just fine - there are some who go ballistic about Grub and insist Lilo is far superior - I don't really know why - Lilo is still offered as an option with PCLinuxOS and some flavors of Ubuntu and Debian... -- Claude Jones Brunswick, MD, USA
