Les Mikesell wrote:
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 you missed the hard part. If I have both hard drives turned on this
IDE becomes like magic the second hard drive. And all my stuff in the
control files are bad and must be changed to /dev/sdb. This can be done
but it sure was not planned to be done.
--
Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
Linux User
#450462 http://counter.li.org.
