Grub issue with controller card.

Stalione · Guru Joined: 21 Apr 2002 Posts: 335

I recently put in a new CMD 648 controller card (very well supported in linux) and plugged just one hard drive to it with a win2k install on it. On the motherboards IDE channels I have primary channel with two drives (both used by gentoo), secondary channel has a dvd rom/cdrw and a cdrom. From my understanding grub only takes in account hard disks and overlooks optical drives. Here is my grub.conf

BillyD · Guru Joined: 05 May 2002 Posts: 323 Location: Australia

Have you tried going to to grub command line and tabbing to see which partitions that grub recognizes? I don't know that that will solve your problem, but it should let you "see" what grub is seeing too...
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Stalione · Guru Joined: 21 Apr 2002 Posts: 335

Ok i went into the command line mode and did not see any options to see what partitions it recognizes. Can you be more clear and precise please?

BillyD · Guru Joined: 05 May 2002 Posts: 323 Location: Australia

At the grub command prompt, if you type in help you will get a full list of commands. You can then type something like >root (hd and then hit the tab key - it will give you the available drives. Choose one, put in a comma and then hit tab again and it will show you a list of the partitions.
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We used to have hominid cousins that were vegetarian. The palæontological record suggests that our ancestors killed them and ate them.

Stalione · Guru Joined: 21 Apr 2002 Posts: 335

Ah yes! beautiful bash completion. Ok I did as you told me and I do have my partitions right...it is indeed hd2,0 !! Except instead of root(hd2,0) it wanted root (hd2,0) (notice the space). So I went ahead and made that change to my grub.conf. Then rebooted and tried to boot win2k and got the following error:

Stalione · Guru Joined: 21 Apr 2002 Posts: 335

Does anyone know what I can do to fix my problem. I am not sure if I need to takeover the MBR on the harddrive win2k is on...I think I already tried to do this by doing setup (hd2,0) because when I put win2k drive on primary channel as the master it does not boot and gives me some grub error.

Stalione · Guru Joined: 21 Apr 2002 Posts: 335

thinking that maybe I screwed up the win2k drive I decided to give it a reinstall. After reinstalling I tried again but with no luck. I don't know what else do I need to do to tell grub to boot that drive. This is what I have for win2k in grub.conf

Stalione · Guru Joined: 21 Apr 2002 Posts: 335

YES! I finally managed to fix the problem...but not without some compromises that Im not sure were needed. To be sure that it was not an issue with the controller card, I took it out of the picture. I plugged in my win2k drive as a Primary Slave on the mobo IDE controller (The one that was plugged in there was merely a 8 gig drive with my MP3s). Then I emerged grubconfig tool. This tool reminds me very much of the slackware lilo tool. Anyways this tool didnt' work very well because it created a very strange config file. I just read through it carefully and modified it according to my needs and next thing I know I had the puppy working. Here is my grub config.

foxcub · Posted: Sat Feb 15, 2003 4:32 pm Post subject:

So did it work once you plugged in the controller card? I have a similar issue. I plugged in a harddrive as a primary drive (/dev/hda), and installed Windows 2000 Pro on it, then I switched it to the onboard ATA-100 controller (so in Linux the drive became /dev/hde). Plugged in another drive (with grub on it) as the primary drive. Grub sees the second drive (the one with Windows) as hd1. I've tried a bunch of different configuration options (including this map stuff), and it works at first, the Windows 2000 "splash screen" (the graphical one with the running line) comes up, but then in a few seconds it crashes talking about INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE (or something like that). I have a suspicion of why that might happen, but that really is just a guess, and to be honest I have no idea what I'm talking about: I'm getting an impression (from the stuff I read online), that grub's map reverses the harddrives by playing with the BIOS interrupts; if this is the case, then it's possible that as Windows is trying to start, it detects the ATA-100 controller, tries to load some sort of a driver for it, and tries to access it through it, at which point, of course, there is an immediate discrepancy between which device is which, and it bails out.

If anyone has any ideas suggestions, etc as to how I can deal with this problem/fix it, and whether my above guesses can even relate to truth, please, let me know.

Thanks.

foxcub · Posted: Sat Feb 15, 2003 6:33 pm Post subject:

Ignore my previous comment. I simply forgot to install the driver for the ATA-100 controller - so everything was actually opposite to what I thought it was. My bad, and sorry for polluting forums.