Okay this is just strange. I bought a new computer case (just the case) and transferred all my hard ware over and made sure I plugged all my drives in the same order and on the same connections on the cables.

Here is what my drive setup was before I transferred cases:

hda = Lite-On CDRW
hdb = WinXP and Fedora Core1 (using Fedora's grub bootloader)
hdc = Gentoo
hdd = Arch-Linux

Now this is where the strangeness lies,

When I booted up my PC after transferring all my stuff over I am greeted with the Grub bootloader from Fedora just like before so I'm thinking all is good, nope, only WinXP and Fedora will boot and after some snooping around I now have this as my drive assignments:

hda=Gentoo
hdb=Lite-On CDRW
hdc= Arch-Linux
hdd= WinXP & Fedora

I checked my Bios and it is set to boot from:
1. CD-ROM
2. HD0 <--- thats a zero
3. floppy

I guess I don't understand how it would still boot properly to my WinXP/Fedora bootloader/drive if it is not the first hard drive to begin with and I was able to boot the Gentoo drive by giving it the same hard drive number (2 in grub) that WinXP/Fedora currently occupy according to cfdisk.

I'm just baffled and figure this is going to cause big problems down the line even though it works now.

rberry88

I would first make sure that you didn't mix up the drives while you were removing/installing them.

If you are sure you know which drives are what, then I would suggest making sure you didn't mix up the primary and secondary IDE channels.

I'll have to check again but I marked the drives with a magic marker (1,2,3) when removing them and I put them in in the same order, pretty much the same places too. I have my cdrw in the 5.25" bay with hard drive #1 under it (mounted with a bracket) and drives #2 & #3 in the hard drive bay lower down. My cdrw and hdd#1 are on IDE1 and hdd#2 & #3 are on IDE2.

What gets me is that my system recognizes the booting hard drive as the 4th drive in the chain but still boots it first even though my BIOS is targeted and hard drive position #1. I'll have to play around more with it tonight to see if I can make sense of it. I have backups (done before the transfer) so if I have to reinstall it shouldn't be too big of a hassle.

rberry88

How is master/slave determined? By the jumpers, or cable select?

I have it set for jumpers and the jumpers appear to be correct.

rberry88