IDE & SATA dual boot on removables.
 

Hello,

Thank you for the opportunity to pick your brains,

I have an odd setup that I have not found anyone else doing. I have a removable IDE drive connected on a bridging motherboard for SATA. I use the same PC with different drives for different purposes. One drive is my daily use, another my game drive and yet another a test drive. Near as I can recall I mapped my motherboard/BIOS drives below.

IDE1--->HDD1
IDE2--->DVD/CDROM
SATA1-->sda1
SATA2-->not installed

The back ground: I bought a new PC and left the hardware as is with the noted changes.
Change 1- moved IDE1 to IDE2
Change 2- added IDE1 removable drive bay.

So the trouble? I use two drives most often so I would like to dual boot those two drives. The trouble is keeping the native drive native thinking it has the MBR while the real MBR is on another drive. When booting (grub) to FC6 (2.6.18) I hit the space bar to select the Windows drive, grub entry on IDE1:
title Crashdows
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1


I see the SATA light activate so I know data is sent to that drive.
IDE1 grub entry
title FC6
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/.......


I have changed the variables for the SATA drive through all the numbers and drive settings I could think of and the farthest I get is grub starting to load with this on the screen:

Booting 'Crashdows'
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
-
^----blinking cursor.

Again I have tried (hd1/2/3,0/1/2/3) on the rootnoverify. I have changed the chainloader +1 to +0, +2 and every time I have the same results. I tried copying the grub.conf settings from my laptop since I dual boot Windows and SuSe10.2 on it, though they are on the same drive. No help there.

Any ideas?:Pengy:

Thanks for your help

Hmmm... you're going to have to see if you can boot linux (fedora rescue mode is good) wile both drives you want to use are attached. Then you can use linux tools to assess the situation in a way most of us will understand.

fdisk -l

The output will tell you, in unix-speak, where those pesky partitions are.

Note: just like windows prefers to be on the first partition on the first HDD, so Grub don't like it much when you change the drive order around. Your easiest solution is actually to settle on a final configuration and reinstall as a standard dual-boot.

You need a serious rethink of your solution though. The easiest way to dual-boot with removable drives is to stick linux on a usb drive and set BIOS to boot from usb first. You will be using the identical method (look it up) only with an IDE drive in place of the usb one.

Hello Simon,

I used the rescue disk, that's how I was able to try all the variants. fdisk ID's my SATA as /dev/sda with /dev/sda1 as the only partition.

I realize this is not the ideal conf, it's what I had before the days of USB bootables. It works for what I have. I knew I was lurking in waters of failed booting when I set it up. I figured I would tinker with it and see if there was another way. I guess the answer is - no. After all that could be the reason it's call Master Boot Record and not Dual Master Records?

Thanks again for your ideas.

w@m

ideally, you should list all ID'd drives. A whole drive with only one partition (occupying the entire drive?) is normally a windows drive.... well, there probably is. Perhaps reinstalling GRUB? It is just going to be long and tricky over a forum like this and you would probably have a workaround rather than a fix. The only actual "fix" will be to set up your system in a more clearly robust manner.

If you use the usb boot approach, modified for IDE/whatever, you'll have a more comprehensible setup which is easier to troubleshoot.

Hi Simon,

/dev/sda with /dev/sda1 partition is a Windows Media Center Edition / XP Home (spruced up). I wanted to leave it alone and not over write the MBR. Other wise I would have just wiped it and made other partitions.


I may have failed to mention it, I currently use a "work around" for my setup. I already re-installed GRUB. I kinda killed GRUB:D when I was attempting to create a "solution" to my work around because I was to lazy to redesign my setup. I was saving some money for a RAID system and did not want to buy USB drives for my desktops.

Easy come, easy go..
I'll just have to buy a couple SATA's to replace the IDE's.

Again thanks for letting me pick every ones brain. I knew the answer, I just did not want to hear it. (OMG, I sound like management....!?!WWIT?)

Thank you Simon for your time. You were very kind.