new sata drive breaks things

futz · 11-26-2005, 01:14 AM

This machine has two IDE drives, one of which is hd0 and has grub and windoze xp on it. The other is my Fedora drive.

I also have a SATA drive, which has Mandriva and SUSE on it.

Tonight I plugged a second SATA drive in and hit the power button. It gets as far as grub stage 2 and just quits. Unplug the new drive and it works fine. Plug it back in and it won't go.

What the f*($&!??? Makes no sense to me. Any ideas?

DaveG · 11-26-2005, 02:50 AM

Check your BIOS settings, particularly how the BIOS maps the SATA drive in to it's "legacy" drive numbering. It could be that inserting the SATA drive changes the device numbers given to the IDE drives. That would certainly "upset" GRUB.
You may also need to check how GRUB numbers the drives - it may use the BIOS numbering or recalculate them from scratch. Same for the Linux kernel, if and when it finally boots.

futz · 11-26-2005, 02:57 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by DaveG
Check your BIOS settings, particularly how the BIOS maps the SATA drive in to it's "legacy" drive numbering. It could be that inserting the SATA drive changes the device numbers given to the IDE drives. That would certainly "upset" GRUB.
You may also need to check how GRUB numbers the drives - it may use the BIOS numbering or recalculate them from scratch. Same for the Linux kernel, if and when it finally boots.

I think you're right on the money. Just minutes ago (before reading your post) I pulled both sata plugs and reversed the order they were plugged in. Started it up and it works fine now. One more odd little detail to write down in my Linux notebook for future reference.

syg00 · 11-26-2005, 03:04 AM

I'd be guessing you have your initial SATA installed on the second interface.
I'd be moving that, then shutdown/startup without the second SATA to ensure everything is still ok, then whack the other drive in and see what happens.