Grub clarification

[Daniel B. Thurman]

>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.

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