I have Fedora Core 2 (64 bit) installed on my SATA disk. I also have the 32 bit version installed on an ide drive.

When I put both drives in at the same time then it no longer boots up. I am trying to boot with the SATA drive.
It gets as far as displaying the message:
Red Hat nash Version 3.5.22 starting
And then stops.

If I disconnect the ide drive again then it boots no problem. I cannot see anything in the logs. I have looked in the boot.log and messages and cannot see anything there. I can also boot up on the ide drive if the SATA drive is disconnected.

Both installs were done without the other drive connected.

I have a biostar K8NHA pro motherboard which uses the via SATA chipset.

Any hints/guesses appreciated.

Thanks.

Where is your grub/lilo or other bootloader? Either your problem
is quite simply that you have a bootloader on each drive, and they're
not properly setup - or there's information amiss in your post.

I have grub on the SATA drive.

This is the config file for it:
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You do not have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
# root (hd0,0)
# kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hde1
# initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hde
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Fedora Core (2.6.8-1.521)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8-1.521 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.8-1.521.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.7-1.494.2.2)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.7-1.494.2.2 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.7-1.494.2.2.img
title Fedora Core (2.6.6-1.435.2.3)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.6-1.435.2.3 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.6-1.435.2.3.img

As far as I can tell the SATA drive is hd0,0 but I am not 100% sure.

This is the bootup message :
Booting 'Fedora Core (2.6.8-1.521)'
kernel direct mapping tables upto 10100000000 @ 8000-c000
root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8-1.521 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
[Linux-bzImage, setup=0x1400, size=0x1a266d]
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.8-1.521.img
[Linux-initrd @ 0x37f3b000, 0xb4567 bytes]



Decompressing Linux...done.
Booting the kernel.
audit(1095706744.237:0): initialized
Red Hat nash version 3.5.22 starting

Which is where it stops. If I boot up without the IDE drive attached it looks identical except for the line:
audit(1095706875.237:0): initialized

I am not sure how the drives are assigned by the bios but is seems to be correct.

mount reports the SATA drive as follows:
/dev/sda1 on / type ext3 (rw)

Thanks.

I'm sorry, but I never could figure out GRUB so I use LILO.
I do see this:
but mount reports /dev/sda1 (is that / on the sata drive?) is ext3,
so that must be the IDE drive it's attempting to boot. I think
that hd0,0 is the master drive on the primary controller, and
hd0,1 is the slave, etc. If so, then I don't know what will be
the designation for sata0 and sata1.

When I've installed the 2.4.26 kernel with my sata drive, it is
recognized at /dev/sda but when I installed 2.6.7 it was then
changed to /dev/hde so I couldn't get it to boot. Check out
this thread http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3795 and see if
it helps.

Thanks for that post.

It has got me a lot further.

I changed the root entry in grub.conf to:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8-1.521 ro root=/dev/sda1 rhgb quiet

Which enabled me to boot correctly (with the correct kernel so I know it is off the correct drive). I guess grub is not passing the correct value through to the kernel.

Now, however, mount seems to be confused.

mount reports :
/dev/hdd2 on / type ext3 (rw)

which is my sata drive! Which used to be sda1.

If use the hardware browser it reports:
/dev/sda1 as the sata drive - but when I type mount it reports otherwise (/dev/hdd2)
/dev/hdd1 as a small extended partition.
/dev/hdd2 as ext3 - which is my other linux partition.

I can now mount /dev/hdd2 and browse my other partition.

Which is what I want.

Thanks.

P.S. I am still confused why mount is reporting the SATA drive as hdd2!?!

Try the LQ search function and enter "sata on Slackware 9.1"
which is where I first read about sata in Slackware. You will
get many threads about sata. Try reading some of that and
see where it leads you. And read and search at KernelTrap
where I gave you the previous link.

I'm trying 2.6.7 on this comp again right now, reading those
links I just "searched up" first....

I've now changed /etc/fstab to read
/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1

Now eveything seems as it should be when I boot up.

mount now reports:
/dev/sda1 on / type ext3 (rw)


Thanks again for your help.