To sum it up, I'm on a Dell 8400 with SATA drives, I put in an older WD IDE drive with 30GB I had sitting around and freshly installed FC3 on it. No problems in the install except Fedora only "saw" the IDE.. I wasn't that concerned, since I wanted FC3 on only that drive anyhow.. BUT...

After rebooting I get no grub loader.. It just boots straight to Windows XP.

I have the IDE on the same cable with a DVD-rom drive (windows hasn't complained, and before loading FC3 I could read/write fine from it)

I'm thinking that my SATA is being checked first, and no loader is on it.. Could this be the problem? Anyone got any suggestions?


Thanks much,

Josh

every drive has its mbr with its loader

go into bios (most use the DEL key) and change boot order to that slave drive
on reboot it should find grub and boot linux

you may then need to amend your menu.lst file to include ms if you have not got one as per my tut

I've tried this and did not have any luck. For some reason the bios doesn't detect the IDE drive (Displays not present next to it). After I switched jumper setings on the IDE to master w/slave present, it simply hanged on reboot and took me to the boot menu (cdrom/floppy or sata drive.. no IDE on the list).

I'm thinking perhaps there is a way to install a boot loader on the SATA on and have it point to the IDE drive for linux. Thoughts?


Josh

bobcat23tx: As a general rule, if linux cannot see an SATA drive, then Grub cannot see it either.

If your SATAs are configured as a Raid (and even as “one drive Raids” as is the case for some Promise controllers), then the Raid is probably software based and linux will not usually see it. And, for sure, Grub will not see it.

Regarding detecting the WD drive in BIOS, Western Digitals are very picky with respect to jumper settings. As a test, try disconnecting the DVD, connect the WD with jumpers set to Cable Select and boot to BIOS. The drive should be there. There may be a conflict between the DVD and WD master/slave jumpers. And while you have the WD by itself, disconnect the power to the SATAs and see what happens when you boot.

If you are stuck and cannot get around the SATA boot, buy a copy of PartitionMagic and use the included BootMagic to direct the boot. You will need to move Grub to “the first sector of the boot partition” to use BootMagic.

I have gone round-and-round with linux SATA-IDE-RAID issues for the past year and it can be very frustrating to resolve, so hang in there.

Hope that helps.

WhatsHisName thats a lovely answer and I hope you are right.

I wonder if there is something buggy with FC3?

maybe bobcat when he boots into FC could try to manually mount the other drive?
something like

su
mkdir /2 (delete it later its just a test directory)
mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /2

where ntfs should be the file system for Xp
and sda1 should be C drive

if that fails we change it to /dev/hde1 ( a raid type)
if that fails we change it to /dev/hda1

then retry to hdbnumber?

I think I'm going to try boot magic to put grub on the boot sector of the Sata. What's sad is I had a lot less problems getting Fc2 on a HP laptop than on my desktop. I thought my problems would be with the PCI Express GA rather than my primary hard drive. I thought SATA was a lot more mainstream now days. Perhaps those working on Fedora will find a good solution for this and put out a fix.

If I can't get FC on it, I'll look to see if any other family friendly distro supports SATA .

Thanks Much,

Josh

bobcat23tx: SATA support depends on whether the SATA controller on your motherboard is supported in the kernel (or how much time you are willing to put into installing the appropriate patch).

A big problem right now with some SATA controllers is the introduction of the new SATA-II specifications, which tends to have spotty driver support in linux right now. Again, it’s SATA controller dependent.

The more modern and up-to-date your hardware is, the more trouble you will have installing linux, regardless of the flavor. Just wait a few months and the kernel will catch up. Sad, but true.

PS: Blame the manufacturers for poor driver support, don’t blame linux.