hey all,

when i add a harddisk to the lenny installation, i cant reboot sucessfully.

The disks are all sata, mounted as JBDO, no raid what so ever.
They can be used in windows xp x64 (they are ntfs formated)

HW setup:

a8n-sli delux
amdx64 cpu
2 gb ram
80 gb matrox sata hdd (connected to sata1 on mobo)
4x samsung spinpoin 1 tb (connected all 4 to sata ports on modo).
1 ata dvdrom set as master

The system boots perfectly whit only the 80 gb installed.
the other 4 disks are detected, but then notting happend..


What must i do to change this?
I whant to make a fileserver, but its no use if i cant use the 4x 1 tb...


thx for the answers!!!

Have you gone into your BIOS and made sure that the boot order is right?

I used to have an ASUS K8N-DL MoBo (very similar board) and it would occasionally re-order the HDD boot order.

If you're not getting as far as GRUB, this is almost certainly your problem.

thx for the answer.

I got in to grub loader. it lets me boot linux or winxp x64.
xp boots perfectly.
When i whant to load linux, i get a bunch of lines whit things it loads.
When it trys to load root, it says that it cant find root....

when i unplug the extra hdd's from the power, linux would load perfec.
all the samsung spinpoints are ntfs formated. one empty.

What i whant to do, is to format the empty one to the linux filesystem, and move the data from one ntfs disk to a other, and so on. Until i have all the disks formated in ext3.

So, its not the bios settings.

in any case, i have the following order in the bios boot section:

removable boot
hdd boot
cdrom boot

in the boot; harddisk drive section, i have:

1. first boot is the maxtor 80gb disk
2. scsi-0 : bla bla
3. scsi-1 : bla bla
4. scsi-2 : bla bla
5. scsi-3 : bla bla
6. bootable add in cards.

so, it always boots the 80 gb disk.

ps: even if i install debian whit all disks attached, it wold in stall ok, also grub, but it still hangs on the scsi part...

ps2: iame downloading ubuntu 8.10 on dvd for amdx64, just to try it out. at the same time, installing debian from cd, just to see what the diverens is. The last installation was from a pen. Maby i can resolv it this way... i let you know what the progress is..


edit:

The reinstallation of debian is done.

Still get the same error.
When i scroll a bit up, to see if there is a error (shfit+page up) i find in the section of the 80 gb maxtor disk the next line:

ata7.00: ata-7: maxtor 6y0880 o, max udma 133
then some lines of info. on the end, where i see done. I see the next warning:

WARNING: boot debive may be renamed. Try root=/dev/hda2
Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:
boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
some rows below i see:
ALERT! /dev/sda2 does not exist dropping to shell!

if i do a cat /proc/cmdline i see this:

root=/dev/sda2 ro

I ame going to play a bit whit grub, to see what i can find. I will eddit this post later on..

i found out what the problem is.

when i instal debian, it assumes that the installation disk is sda (sda1).

So, grub makes the configuration for sda1.
But right after reboot (dont know why and how) it seems that the disks are changed to sde. Then its naturaly that grub cant find root.

What i did is installing ubuntu 8.10, i saw that ubuntu instals grub right under sde. Later (next week orso) i ame going to change back to debian to see if i can solve this problem (think so, need a bit of search...).

I have now evrything running under ubuntu. So its easyer for me to make the changes to the hdd right now. And do later the installation whit only ext3...


Thx!! and have a nice weekend!

was it a message about not being able to find the root device?

if so, edit your /boot/grub/grub.conf (menu.lst on some distro's)
find the kernel entry you're booting off and change the "root=/dev/sda2" parameter to the right drive.

depending on how deb does it, there may be a "root=/dev/ram0" and a "real_root=/dev/sda2" it's the second one you want.

ubu uses uuid's to get around this problem, regardless of what order your drives get picked up in (and therefore what dev name they get assigned) it will still have the same uuid

..

personally, I'd stick with ubu, it's somewhat more friendly/complete than debian, I'm trialling 9.04 (alpha 6) atm and it's got some sweet stuff in store..

hope this helps

Thx for your answer now i realy do understand what the problem is...
and yes, debian uses menu.list.

I ame using right now ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop and server/deskstop.

I have just evrything configured. Including nzb using for usenet.
Samba is also running, need just a litle tweak here and there.

i will try to finish the configure section in ubuntu. if i like it, i will stay. Otherwise, i switch to debian.

But then again, on debian i could not get drqueue to work..
In ubuntu it was whit one line done... (like other tools)...

but heck, i still like more debian than ubuntu... (more stable) but if i can get all to work in ubuntu.....

thx for the explanation...