On Sat, 2004-11-27 at 17:46 -0800, JERRY WHITMIRE wrote: Still hangin' in there with FC3T3 I see. Yes. It is not necessary to have them all on separate disks. Could have them all on one disk on different partitions, or some mix. Win XP generally wants to be on a primary partition, and you might have to have grub fool it into thinking it is on the first disk. For example, if XP is on the second disk... title WinXP on hde1 map (hd0) (hd1) map (hd1) (hd0) rootnoverify (hd1,0) chainloader +1 May need /boot partitions for both OSs in the first 1024 cylinders on their respective disks, depending on the BIOS. Not sure what you mean here. The order is determined by the order of the boot stanzas in /boot/grub/grub.conf while the default is determined by the "default=X" line, the first stanza being X=0, the second X=1, etc. Phil

On Sat, 2004-11-27 at 20:01 -0800, Vadim wrote: Because GRUB is more powerful, has a shell, doesn't have to be reinstalled every time the config is changed? Good old LILO is still there in the base distribution if you want to use it. Quite a few people still seem to like it, or maybe old habits die hard. Phil

Phil Schaffner wrote: No, but install a new drive and with no errors you may get nothing but a blinking cursor after selecting your entry. The documentation for grub does not seem explain how drives are ordered or how to list the order in which they are detected. Mapping drives seems like driving in the dark without headlights on a moonless night. Can you point me and the rest of the people suffering from this problem to some enlightening information on how to configure grub from a rescue disk so that it will work after installing an SATA, SCSI or RAID drive. In bugzilla there are hundreds of bugs marked as "NOTABUG" with a variety of issues similar to this. The "fixes" for this type of problem appear to be quite mysterious, and without reasonable explanation to why someone did what they did to make it work. I had to reinstall FC3 and reorder the drives in the advanced boot config to make it work. Bandwidth and time required to reinstall and get all the updates again aside, this is not a reasonable way to add SATA drives to a machine. Lilo may not have a shell, but it does not add ambiguity to which drive is which. I don't see how being able to mess around in your boot loader during boot is of any more help. All I used to do was boot a rescue disk edit lilo.conf, run lilo and reboot, no big deal. Three days of messing around struggling through "info grub" and searching bugzilla, is not intuitive. If grub was more intuitive, and not encumbered by "magic" device mapping your assessment might be correct. But with no apparent documentation on how to properly modify "device.map", or even if it is the right file to modify, it is almost a futile effort to modify the grub config by hand. Lilo is a good boot loader, and that is all it is good for, but thats what it was meant to do. Most people don't need access to a shell that lets them muck around before the system boots, most people just want to select an option if they have a multi boot system or different kernels for testing purposes. Too bad lilo can't be installed as the default boot loader. According to bugzilla there are hundreds of complaints about grub causing problems that are not bugs, but can not be solved intuitively by modifying a single file and running a simple command to update the boot configuration. My opinion is that either GRUB is poorly designed, too complex for most users, or needs good {not info based} documentation, that explains how to map real devices to the logical devices used in the menu.lst file. Or grub should not internally rearrange logical device maps when new devices are added as it appears to be doing. -- Guy Fraser Network Administrator

Vadim wrote: Man do I agree with that one. Grub is very painfull, to configure with SATA and regular IDE mixed together. With grub add a non IDE or SATA device and grub won't boot... I finally figured out that I had to rearange the drives in the advanced boot setup during install of FC3, so that the sd drives came before the hd drives, now I can have regular IDE and SATA in the same machine. Using lilo you just use the actual device name in the config file like "/dev/hda1" or "/dev/sda1", not some stupid pointer like "hd0" to a map entry to a device. -- Guy Fraser Network Administrator