Just a heads up for those who will be getting a shiny new SATA disk
for Christmas!
I opened my present early and tried to install a new SATA drive in
with my existing IDE drives. GRUB went into a sulk and wouldn't boot
the system. Turns out this is a known and nasty problem which is to
do with the enumeration and naming of the drives. BIOS, GRUB and
kernel all have different opinions on the matter. In my case the BIOS
thinks any SATA drive must be number 1 in the list even though I'm
booting from an IDE drive. This varies from BIOS to BIOS (of course!)
SO: if you get GRUB complaining about an unreadable disk when you have
a mix of SATA and PATA drives you too can join the fun Christmas
party game of 'Guess the GRUB root drive designation'!
LOTS of further details and (yukky) workarounds at
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub/+bug/8497
ATB, Peter
