Grub clarification

[Craig White]

On Mon, 2007-12-03 at 18:48 -0800, Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
> >From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com
> >[mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com]On Behalf Of Tod Merley
> >Sent: Monday, December 03, 2007 1:52 PM
> >To: For users of Fedora
> >Subject: Re: Grub clarification
> >
> >
> >On Dec 3, 2007 10:53 AM, Daniel B. Thurman <dant at cdkkt.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> I am trying to install F8 onto my old system and having
> >> trouble getting grub to find the drive. Here is the story.
> >> [snip!]
> >
> >Hi Daniel B. Thurman!
> >
> >Two things come to mind:
> >
> >1. HW!  Some drives and CMOS combinations just do not work.  Check the
> >CMOS client, that it sees the drive and that the drive is high on the
> >boot list.  Check to see that it is Master on the first IDE bus.
> >Since it is an old system you might do well to load the defaults and
> >edit the boot list (a "until you shut the power off" fix for a bad
> >CMOS battery).
> >
> >2. Mis-placed or malformed Master Boot Record (MBR).  The MBR needs to
> >be the very first 512 bytes of the disk - loading GRUB on the second
> >partition sounds strange although the MBR can be built to find GRUB
> >anywhere.  To help sort that one out I refer you to a Google search on
> >"grub thestarman" and the GRUB manual.
> >
> >Good Hunting!
> >
> >Tod
> >
> 
> Yeah, that is part of my original problem.  I have several other disks
> and they are attached to SCSI drives as well.  The BIOS is a bit screwy
> in try to determine the order of how disks are being read and which comes
> first?  The SCSI drives or the IDE drives?  I still couldn't figure this
> out.  The system is: VA Linux Systems: 501.  Pretty old.
> 
> When I first started with F8-Live, the screen showing custom partitions
> displayed in order:
> 
> /dev/sda SCSI disk 1
> /dev/sdb SCSI disk 2
> /dev/sdc IDE-0 Primary disk 3
> /dev/sdd IDE-0 Secondary disk 4
> 
> So in THAT case, I tried to install GRUB in /dev/sdc1 and choosed
> the Advanced Options to set MBR @ /dev/sdc1.  This did not work.
> 
> So - then I decided to remove ALL SCSI drives and in doing so, I
> was left with:
> 
> /dev/sda IDE-0 Primary disk 1
> /dev/sdb IDE-0 Secondary disk 2
> 
> So, I am focusing on this right now trying to get things going
> but then again, I am still not able to get GRUB to get started
> and all I see on a boot is a black screen with the word: GRUB
> at the top-left corner of my monitor.
----
again...try my suggestion to boot with rescue disc and run through
grub-install /dev/sda

Note...with scsi drives in place, it's likely that you would have to
tell grub to boot from...
root (hd3,0) 
  without the scsi hard drives in place...
root (hd0,0)

Craig