Alternative booting

[David Krings]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> David Krings wrote:
> 
>> OK, two things: I did not change any BIOS mapping or drive or boot 
>> sequence. I install F7, GRUB installs fine, GRUB boots fine, I install 
>> updates => GRUB is broken beyond repair.
> 
> How is it failing?  It may be that your update kernel is just in
> a location your bios can't load.  This used to be common in old bios 
> versions that couldn't go past 1024 cylinders and is probably possible 
> again with more exotic drive configurations.

It stops at the grub> prompt. And the board is brand new and not out for 
that long that I'd call it old.
I also don't consider a SATA RAID on an nVidia controller as exotic. 
Those things are on tons of mobos from at least a dozen vendors.

>> I did remove drives in order to get F7 to install at all and yes, I 
>> added those drives on later, BUT even after doing that GRUB booted 
>> fine. It is just that after updating the system the whole shebang 
>> comes apart for no good reason. GRUB just ought to continue booting 
>> from the same drive and same partition it booted from before...and it 
>> just doesn't do that.
>>
>> Also, I do not have plain simple IDE drives, but a RAID array on the 
>> nVidia SATA controller that I want to use to boot from. In that case, 
>> when I specify a hdx device it will write the boot loader to only one 
>> of the drives of the mirror array, which doesn't do any good.
> 
> If bios sees the drives as separate things, then that's how you have to 
> install grub, since it has to call bios to load the kernel.  On a real 
> hardware raid, bios will only see the array.

BIOS sees them as one drive. A working F7 sees them as two drives and as 
one under the /mapper dir.
I could see this to be a BIOS problem if nothing loads, but GRUB does 
load at least so far as that it gets to the grub> prompt. So it is not 
that BIOS is confused. It is purely a GRUB issue.


David