Hi,

I have a bit of an exotic configuration here:
I have a motherboard without a SATA connector, so I bought a PCI SATA card, through which I can mount/unmount my new SATA HDD without problems. (so the card + hard drive work)

The problem comes from my motherboard that doesn't "see" the SATA drive at boot (probably due to the PCI card), therefore I have to use my IDE hard drive for booting purposes.

My Fedora related problem here is that I currently use fedora core 4, on my IDE hdd, and I have setup Fedora10 on my new SATA hdd (for which the installer immediately loaded the correct via drivers). However as I said my motherboard doesn't see the sata drive, so I was trying to get GRUB from my FC4 setup to give an option to load also F10(which is on the SATA drive) from the IDE drive.
So far no success, and I came to wonder whether Grub was able to load a SATA drive that is not directly recognised by the motherboard? (that is, load the proper Via drivers for the pci card then boot?)

Any help would be appreciated!

From lspci:
00:07.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6421 IDE RAID Controller (rev 50)

The reason for this setup is a mix of cost constrains due to the IDE hdd dying up, hence the need of having my files on the new HDD.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Go to the GRUB command prompt. GRUB has a find command, so search for /boot. If Grub finds alternatives it will display all of them. You'll be able to tell which is for FC4 / FC10. You can then copy the appropriate one over to your "menu.lst" and should be okay.

I tried "find /boot", and nothing happens, grub becomes unresponsive (I've left it alone for 20 minutes and after that it was still frozen)

I am not sure what is happening, but I have a bad feeling that grub cannot understand my SATA drive, since the motherboard doesn't report it as a drive.

Any other suggestions?

Hmm. GRUB is very fast when you do that and you hear the drive head working. Just to be sure: You did this from the GRUB command line? To get the prompt back, did you try typing in either q or <CTRL>C or <ESC>?

How do you mount a partition of your SATA-drive (please show the entire command)?

First of all, thank you for your help.

Ok, for the command I entered when typing find /boot it was indeed in the grub boot menu, typing 'c'. I get a prompt looking like "grub>".

I tried q ctrl^c and esc, only ctrl+alt+del worked.

the command I type once I have booted the system up is
mount /dev/sda7 /home/username/Desktop/sda7

(my files are on sda7, the system files are setup on sda2)

Thanks!

P.S. I have partitioned the drive (a while ago) so that sda1 is a 150Mb partition to host the boot folder, however in my latest reinstall I forgot to specify all the different mount points, except for the "/" mount (on sda2) therefore the boot folder is inside sda2. Do you think this might be confusing grub?

Okay, that clarifies it. Looks like GRUB hasn't loaded the IDE-SATA module and I have no idea how to make it do that. A pity that no real expert is contributing here .

So I can only post some links in case you don't know them yet:

http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/grub/grub.htm
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...41#post1208741
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hooter-237511/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hooter-237511/
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/
http://www.mcc.ac.uk/grub/grub_toc.html
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/lin...to_threadtools

HTH .

Thanks for your help, a pity indeed that no expert contributed - so far (I still have hope!)
I might start a more specific thread, about loading SATA-IDE modules with grub. Not sure it can be done though...and if that is the case, then I am in trouble!

Unfortunately I have been through almost all of the sites you recommended!

Thanks again!

Your motherboard bios needs to see the drive before grub can boot it. I am not up to speed on this but I would see if there is a bios update for your m/b. I have used pci ide adapters in the past and bios saw them.

BIOS-update? Could you do that?

Motherboard manufactures update their bios on most motherboards after their manufacture date. Find the brand and model number of the motherboard then go to the manufactures web site and they will have a list of different bios updates and the motherboards usually with the directions for the update.

Well, I have tried updating the bios only to find out that the MSI (my mo-bo manufacturer) bios update can only be done through windows... :/
Plus, I am not sure that such an update would allow the motherboard to understand the sata drive through the PCI card.

Do you think it would be possible to have grub load a file on say a USB drive which in turn loads the SATA driver, enabling the pc to boot on the SATA drive afterwards?
Thanks for your help!

Meanwhile I will contact MSI to ask about this specific upgrade.

Thank you all for your help!

<long-shot mode>

I think it is in the /boot directory where the GRUB files are kept (else it is in /boot/grub). There reside the stage files of GRUB itself and the file system drivers GRUB loads to boot your system. When or if you find a driver, copy it over here. Maybe, just maybe GRUB loads it as well.

This is a long shot, you were warned .

Another thing to try is Super Grub disk. It is supposed to find all bootable OS's on your system and give you a choice to boot.