Re: Problem booting OS on IDE PCI adaptor card with Grub in MBR of hda

On Sunday 16 July 2006 02:47, nigel henry wrote:
On Thursday 13 July 2006 04:17, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
Nigel Henry wrote:
Hi Mikkel. Thanks for explaining how the floppy boot works. From FC2 I
ran /sbin/grub-install /dev/hda, which was successfull and displayed my
edited drive map. Rebooted, but still no go, and a "no such disk" when
trying to boot FC1. Next I booted up Win ME on the basis that at least
I can see what it says about the card, as I'd used the supplied boot
floppy to install the drivers on that. According to the device manager
there are no problems with the card, the only difference from the cards
handbook was that the handbook said that I would find the card in
harddrive controllers, but it was actually listed in scsi controllers.
Not much help there.

Next I venture into the BIOS. In the boot section the dvdrom (hdg) is
listed last on the list. Also, all 3 harddrives are showing in the
BIOS.

Running out of ideas here, but thought I'd try to boot from the dvdrom
drive, and moved it up to before the harddrive. Then tried Knoppix 5.0,
but it gave me a boot failed. Not being sure if dvdrom drives can boot
cdroms I found my only dvdrom for mdk 10.1, and tried that. The output
from that try was:

Every DVD drive I have used will boot from a bootable CD as well.
But you may run into a problem with your setup where what you are
booting does not find the DVD drive.

Isolinux 1.76 Mandrake Isolinux:
Disk error 01, AX = 423B, Drive 00
Boot failed: press a key to retry...
Zilch!. Had to hard reset.

I somehow think that this is going to end up going nowhere. I will
either have to put up with using the floppy for FC1, which Fedora
legacy are dropping in the next few days, but that's my choice if I
want to continue using it. Or I can move FC1 to either hda or hdb,
which I don't know how to do, and just use hde, which is on the IDE PCI
adaptor card for backups , and data, as it works ok once the system is
booted up.

Unless you have any further ideas, I suppose it's a case of "you can't
win em all" Nigel.

Well, with the BIOS showing all 3 hard drives, I wonder if the error
message you are getting is actually from the Grub install on hde
after you chain to it. Were you using a different drive
configuration when Grub was installed? If so, you may have to
re-install Grub after booting FC1. But make sure you are installing
it to the MBR on hde, and not overwriting your working Grub install.
Then make sure you are chainloading to the right place.

Mikkel

Hi Mikkel. Sorry for the delay in replying. I've been trying various
incantations, then the other machines psu fan stopped (ran out of oil) and
tripped the psu's thermal cutout, so I had to spend a bit of time fixing
that.
Anyway back to the job in hand.

I'v actually just got FC1 to boot from the main bootloader in hda, but that
is from a kernel entry, not the chainloader. All I get from trying to
chainload is a grub prompt.

Running /sbin/grub I tried different drives to see if grub> root (hdx,0)
would find somewhere to put FC1's bootloader. grub> root (hd2,0) printed
the following, after also running grub> setup (hd2).

grub> root (hd2,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

grub> setup (hd2)
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd2)"... 15 sectors are
embedded. succeeded
Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd2) (hd2)1+15 p
(hd2,0)/boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/grub.conf"... succeeded
Done.

There's some weird stuff going on here, as (hd2) hdc, is the cdwriter, and
when I ran grub> setup (hd2) the writers light was flickering quite a bit,
but as you can see from the output above, the bootloader installed ok.

Another thing that is a bit weird, is that the kernel entries in grub.conf,
apart from the latest from fedora legacy show a strange entry after
label=/. Again, as below.
LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi (perhaps this has something to do with Win ME
identifying the IDE PCI adaptor card as a scsi controller)

I've never seen that before.

Quite what the situation is with the cdwriter now, I don't know. It wasn't
showing up in the mobo's BIOS before. Only the cdrom drive (hdd), and the
dvdrom (hdg) which I couldn't boot a distro from were there.

As I can boot an FC1 kernel from the main bootloader, the harddrive on the
IDE PCI adaptor card is obviously accessable, but there is obviously some
problem with the BIOS regarding drive ID's. Webmin on FC1 still shows the
harddrive on the IDE PCI adaptor card as IDE device E, and yet the mobo's
BIOS is identifying this same harddrive as hdc.

Anyway, the only problem left now is accessing the Grub menu. I've been
back into FC1, and changed the splashimage from (hd4,0) to (hd2,0), but
still only get the Grub prompt when trying to chainload to (hd2,0) hdc1,
aka hde1.

Nigel.

Update.

Back into FC2's grub.conf, and adding yet another chainloader entry as below.
title FC1 chainloading to (hd2)
root (hd2)
chainloader +1

Shutdown, reboot, then choose "FC1 chainloading to (hd2)" from Grubs menu, and
Eureka, I'm chainloaded to FC1's Grub menu. Job done I think, but this has
taken nearly 2 years to sort this problem. Next thing is to find out what has
happened to the cdwriter that was using hdc, but thats for another day.

Nigel.

--

Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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