Grub drive order problem

av1 at ansae.com av1 at ansae.com
Sat May 28 23:58:52 UTC 2005


I have a system built with an Asus mb with 2 standard ATA drives on the 
primary IDE controller and 2 SATA drives on the SATA controller. My primary 
FC3 system is on /dev/hda and it sees these drives as /dev/hda, /dev/hdb, 
/dev/sda, and /dev/sdb, respectively. I installed a second copy of FC3 on 
/dev/hdb, and gave it it's own grub on /dev/hdb1. I planned to chainload 
from the first grub to the second. (I'm doing this because it want to play 
with some custom kernels on /dev/hdb and wanted to isolate changes to the 
main grub.conf.) On both hda and hdb I gave /boot into its own partition. 

It's not working, and I found out the reason by going into the grub shell 
from the main grub. I ran "find /grub/stage1".  It found two copies of 
stage1 on (hd0,0) and (hd3,0). The first one is from the /boot partition on 
/dev/hda1, of course. The second one is apparently from the grub I installed 
on /dev/hb1, so it thinks (hd3) is /dev/hdb. However, when I looked at 
devices.map, it says (hd0)=/dev/hda, (hd1)=/dev/hdb, (hd2)=/dev/sda, and 
(hd3)=/dev/sdb. Further, if I try to set the root to (hd1,0) (which should 
be /dev/hdb1 according to the devices.map file), it tell me the partition 
type is 0xfd. This is a software raid volume from /dev/sda (or sdb). So, 
despite what devices.map says, grub thinks the SATA drives are on (hd1) and 
(hd2) and it thinks /dev/hdb is (hd3). 

So, should I ignore this problem and just chainload to (hd3,0)+1, or how can 
I fix my grub configuration so it thinks (hd1) is /dev/hdb? 

Thanks,
Cliff Avey




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