Grub / HPT370 help!

[Reylas]

So I broke down yesterday and tried to install a new Gentoo system on my home workstation as I have started growing tired of WinME. I followed the instructions the best that I could, and now I am sitting at a dead machine . If anyone could help me get back on track I would appreciate it.

First off, the machine is an Abit KT7 Raid machine, but I only have one hard drive with no RAID setup. It has one 40GB hard drive that I partitioned this way. (during the install with fdisk)

hde1 - WindowsME ~18gb
Hde2 - Extended partition
hde5 - 100mb boot partition ext3
hde6 - 1gb swap partition
hde7 - ~18gb root partition xfs

I went through all the settings, and everything seemed to go fine until I hit the grub install. I ran these commands:

root (hd0,4) - since this is my boot partition
setup (hd0)
quit

on reboot, I get this from the HPT370 bios
'The device of Primary Master is disabled, you can't use it before rebuild'

if I press any key to continue, it will give me an invalid hard drive.
if I go into the BIOS, it says that the hardrive is invalid and I see no way of fixing it.

I feel like I have a working system on there, but I cannot boot into Linux or WinMe.

HELP!!!!

Mark Salyer

[Reylas]

Just in case someone else hits it as well, you have to go into the bios settings for the controller and *remove* the raid array (even though there isn't one) and it will remove the invalid status. I only had one drive, so I did not have an array to remove but it still did the job. Known bug with the HPT370.

Now, to get Gentoo booting with WinME, I had to do an even better trick. Instead of using Grub, which always failed, I emerged lilo and installed that. Lilo worked perfectly the first time. I know everyone says Grub is better, but I could not get it to work.. Lilo worked great.

If anyone runs into the same problem, maybe this will help. It took me 3 installs and losing my WinME partition once, but now I have a new WinME install and a new Gentoo install.. Now on to KDE.

Reylas

[rommel]

i think the problem with grub you were having was related to the e2fs_stage_1.5 ...if you remove it from grub...then it will boot...there is an issue it has with the 370 or something...i am not sure technically what it is but i have done it and it worked...i would install everything set up the menu.lst but not run grub....then i would reboot at post install and boot with a grub floppy and set

grub> root (hd0,0)

grub> setup (hd0)

grub> reboot


then on the next reboot i would get the splash screen ...i.e it was reading from the menu.lst i created.
just remember if you try it to have a grub boot disk...drobbins did a very good howto on grub, see the articles section.....and remember to remove the e2fs_stage_1.5

now this was with a raid array but maybe it would help even with out one....i never did have luck with the hpt370a in terms of performance though...it was terribly slow on read transfers...i fianally gave up and went with a promise strait ide controller and lsr.
but read the grub howto just for the hell of it...i really like grub and have never used it before gentoo...i also like nano ...and now in freebsd their editor of choice is ee , terribly simple as compared to vi...anyway ...try the above if you feel like experimenting...and have fun

ciao