Grub problem with SATA drives

[Hadders]

Tim wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-12-08 at 17:39 +0100, Pedro Bezunartea Lopez wrote:
>   
>> I have a strange problem with grub. I had fedora installed on a SATA
>> drive, 7th partition. I started to have problems with the disk so I got a
>> new one. I forgot to buy the SATA cable so, for a few days I replaced the
>> bad disk with the new one, doing a fresh install, this time on the 5th
>> partition. No problems there. Then, when I connected both disks at the
>> same time a strange boot problem appeared.
>>
>> The symptom is that hd0 is sdb and hd1 is sda. This has taken me a while
>> to figure out. I even did a new clean installation with both disks
>> connected. The installation took sda as the new disk and sdb as the old
>> one, as expected, but when I tried to reboot, the word "GRUB" filled the
>> screen and it did not boot.
>>     
>
> You, now, have two SATA drives plugged in at the same time?  For
> interest's sake, what happens if you swap their data connectors around?
> I would have expected something like that to be the solution.
>
>   
Umm, I think you'll find the problem goes deeper than that. When you did 
a fresh install, the other drive didn't exist.
So Fedora LABELLED your new partitions the SAME as the old disks.

This means you have multiple labelled drives that are the SAME == BAD
So, boot up in rescue mode (disk 1) then at prompt > linux rescue
Then do an fdisk -l /dev/sda , fdisk -l /dev/sdb
That will list all the paritions.  sda is Port 0 on the mainboard, sdb 
is Port 1
You can then type e2label /dev/sda(x) where x is the number 
corresponding to your linux partitions.
This will simply LIST the volume labels
You should only have ONE root (/), so to relabel it, the command is the 
same, but with the new label on the end, e.g  e2label /dev/sda3 /  will 
relabel parition 3 as root (/)

Hope that helps