Fedora 8

[Karl Larsen]

Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> Konstantin Svist wrote:
>   
>> Oh, okay - that's not so bad then :)
>> Grub is supposed to see one of the drives as (hd0) and another one as
>> (hd1). These correspond to physical drives. If you have more than 2
>> physical drives, it might be (hd2), etc...
>> If you used the BIOS to switch between drives (selecting primary boot
>> drive), then grub will probably change the names around, be careful!
>>
>>     
> What makes things interesting is that the drive order can change
> depending on the boot device. If the BIOS defaults to booting off
> the IDE drive, but you told it to boot off the SATA drive instead,
> then when you boot off a CD/DVD, the IDE drive may go back to being
> hd0, instead of the SATA being hd0 when you tell the BIOS to boot
> off that drive. If you tell it to boot of a USB drive, then the USB
> drive becomes hd0, the IDE drive is back to hd1, and the SATA drive
> is hd2. (Actually BIOS drives 80, 81, and 82.) The thing it, this is
> not Grub (or LILO) doing something, this is the BIOS changing
> things. Because the installer creates the Grub configuration file
> based on the drive mapping during install, it doesn't always get
> things right when you booted off a CD/DVD.
    Here is a problem. I looked for away to get the loader to make a 
grub with the setup on the boot partition but could not find a way to do 
that. On reflections now, what I should have done was not let the loader 
mess with grub. It is easy to fix from a rescue DVD.


>  The drive mapping the
> BIOS is using when you do that may not be the mapping when you boot
> off another device.
>
>   
    I think that is it exactly.
> Because the installer has no way to tell if the current drive
> mapping is the normal mapping, it is up to the user to verify, and
> correct as necessary, the drive mapping being used. This is also why
> partition and volume labels are used by default - that way, once you
> have fixed the boot loader's configuration file, Linux can boot
> without changes. But if you are doing more then one Linux install,
> pick good labels instead of using the default ones. This is also a
> good idea if you expect to move the drive to another system for
> repair, data recovery, etc...
>
> Mikkel
>   
    Yes the fstab on F8 has labels the loader used. I do need to make 
them more detailed.

    Also left selinux in full force. No problems yet that I know of.

Karl


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.