Re: grub with sata drives? - Success

On Tue, Nov 04, 2008 at 08:21:45AM +0530, Raj Kiran Grandhi wrote:
Thomas H. George wrote:
On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 03:00:56PM -0600, elijah rutschman wrote:
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 2:28 PM, Thomas H. George <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I have two sata drives, sda and sdb with the root partition on sdb. I
installed grub on sdb and made the following entries in
/boot/grub/menu.lst:
As far as I know, grub doesn't use the Linux /dev/ nodes to access
disks. The syntax for both IDE and SATA drives should be the same for
your menu.lst, so something along the lines of groot=(hd0,0). Since
you are using the secondary drive (in Linux, /dev/sdb) I guess it
would probably be groot=(hd1,0). You'd still want kopt=root=/dev/sdb1
as it is though, since that parameter is intended for the kernel and
not the bootloader.

-Elijah

Well groot=(hd2,0) works - that is, when trying to boot I now get a
message:

root (hd2,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-amd64 root=/dev/sdb1 ro

Error 15: File not found

Is your /boot on a separate partition?

Please post more information on your partition layout. At the very least
mention the partition of your /boot and the total number of disks in
your system. You mentioned having two SATA drives, but do you also have
any IDE drives?

The 'groot=<dev>' line in menu.lst should be commented out with a single
'#'. update-grub uses this line to figure out the partition where your
/boot is located. If your /boot is on a dedicated partition, then the
kernel would be found in the root of that filesystem. So the kernel line
should read:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-amd64 root=/dev/sdb1

If you are able to get to a grub prompt while booting, you can manually
specify the kernel and vmlinuz and use <tab> for autocomplete.

At the grub prompt, press 'c' to get to the console.

type root (hd<tab>

This command I had found before and the result was hd0,hd1,hd2. I have
three hard drives, one ide and two sata. In BIOS MAIN they are
identified as Primary IDE Master, Sata 1 and Sata 3 (Sata 2 is an
optical drive). In the distant past the IDE drive contained Windoz but
I reformated it as ext3 for data storage. Sata 1 has a vfat partition
with some Windoz data files and a ext3 partition with an earlier Debian
installation. Sata 3 has a single ext3 partition with my current Debian
installation, Lenny.

that should list all the drives. Select the appropriate number, and
press <tab> to list the paritions. Select the partition that makes most
sense.

type 'kernel /<tab>' and use tabcompletion to point grub to the correct
kernel and initrd.

This command - which I had not used before - provided the solution to
the mystery. After setting root (hd0,0) the result of kernel /<tab>
produced information known to be on Sata 1! Why? In BIOS Boot Hard
Drives I had set the sequence as Sata 3, IDE, Sata 1 and grub was using
this order, not the order in BIOS MAIN. Therefore the correct entry for
groot has to be (hd0,0).

Once you know its obvious, right?

Thanks for putting me on the right track.

Tom

Once you have all the needed info, you can modify menu.lst appropriately.

good luck.

--

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
-- Albert Einstein


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