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 Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
