BIOS problem?
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sat Oct 20 22:22:46 UTC 2007
Karl Larsen wrote:
>> Add-on cards sometimes have an option to disable their own bios which
>> you should do if you don't want to boot from them. Usually if you
>> boot from a drive it remains mapped into the first position but if you
>> don't it will be later in the list. The motherboard bios may also
>> give you an extensive choice (or not...) about what order to check for
>> bootable devices. 'Dmesg' will show the linux device probe sequence
>> and discovery order, assuming things worked well enough to get that far.
>>
> Well it never got that far. But for fun what happened? I rebooted
> into the F7 64 bit installation DVD and I installed the thing. It came
> up just fine but the usual problem with Nvidia, no pointer. I managed to
> get a terminal down and mounted this Linux and found what fixed the
> pointer on this and put it in the new 64 bit machine, rebooted and still
> no pointer.
>
> Looked with fdisk and sure as heck the SATA drive was /dev/sda. The
> IDE drive was now /dev/sdb. To fix this was major work. I would have to
> change grub and fstab and god only knows what else to make this system
> work as /dev/sdb.
>
> Now the grub in the F7/64 put the setup in /dev/sdb4 which is very
> odd since it wound up being the first disk.
>
> After all the strange things I tried to do something right but there
> is no way. I unplugged the SATA drive, went up in rescue CD and reset
> grub to where it was. Now I am back on the well set up IDE hard drive.
>
> My bios IS weird. The IDE drive is master in the first IDE listing or
> IDE0. The SATA drive is on IDE2 and there is no master slave. This made
> me think the SATA would show up as it used to as /dev/sdf and work fine.
> Well it didn't and I lay the blame square on the BIOS. I can't fix this.
Its not unusual for your boot drive to stay first. For most things
you'd want to do you can work around this by putting your /boot(s) on
partitions on the drive your PC natively wants to boot from, but you can
make the OS root anywhere you want. For multi-boot systems you may be
able to put the kernel/initrd's for both versions in the same partition
with a single grub.conf and entries to choose, or you may want separate
boot partitions and to reinstall the grub MBR with different root
options to switch between them.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
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