On 15/12/2007, Peter Salisbury <peterthevicar@???> wrote:
> 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
>
The work around I would use would be to go into grub's interactive
options, and edit the boot config. You can use tab completion in grub
to find out if you have the correct grub device name. Once you have
fixed grub, you then have the fstab problems of the drives now being
called different names as well. If you had used LVM on the drives,
this will not be a problem, but if not using LVM you will have to boot
a livecd and edit the /etc/fstab manually.
