Alternative booting

[David Krings]

Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> One other thing that can mess up grub is if you tell the BIOS to
> boot from another drive. This can change the drive ordering that the
> BIOS reports. For example, if I boot normally, my internal hard
> drive is hd0, but if I boot off a USB drive, then that drive is hd0.

I specified booting other device, but the sequence is CD, HDD, Floppy, 
None. I can change the order of the HDDs in the BIOS and set the RAID to 
be the first drive.

> I don't know if grub has this problem, but I remember that with
> lilo, you had to tell it if you were booting off a SCSI drive on a
> mixed SCSI/IDE system. It would assume that the IDE drive was mapped
> as the first hard drive by the BIOS. I believe it would have the
> same problem with a system with both SATA and PATA controllers, but
> I never tried it.

I do have DVD drives on the onboard IDE, but those are correctly 
identified as optical drives. All hard drives appear as SCSI drives as 
both the SATA RAID as well as the Promise IDE controller are listed as 
SCSI drives in the BIOS.

I will keep turning off boot other device in mind if I ever attempt 
installing GRUB again, but it really shouldn't be any problem as I have 
the boot device sequence and the drive sequence clearly defined.

Besides that, I don't think I ask from GRUB to perform something 
extraordinarily special. FakeRAID SATA is around for about two years and 
F7 does load the correct drivers and detects the RAID array correctly. I 
strongly believe that the RAID isn't the problem here, but the Promise 
controller and only when it installs its BIOS as there is generally not 
a  problem when I disconnect the drives.

David