grub hangs when adding sata disks
 

Hi,

My current system works fine, a poweredge 1800 with 2 sata disks on a onboard controller, configured in RAID. Grub boots fine everything is ok. Here is the working menu.lst

title Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (2.6.9-34.0.1.ELsmp)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-34.0.1.ELsmp ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol02
initrd /initrd-2.6.9-34.0.1.ELsmp.img



I've added this PCI controller:

06:03.0 RAID bus controller: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC40719 [FastTrak TX4300/TX4310] (rev 02)
Subsystem: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC40719 [FastTrak TX4300/TX4310]
Flags: bus master, 66Mhz, medium devsel, latency 88, IRQ 10
I/O ports at cc80
I/O ports at c800
Memory at df7ff000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable)
Memory at df7c0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable)
Expansion ROM at df800000 [disabled]
Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2

I've compiled the module, and inserted it, until here, no problem.

Now if I add 2 new seagate SATA HDD to this controlller, the controller BIOS will detect them and mark them as working. BUT, if I add them to a RAID, or a JBOD, then the system hangs after grub stage 2. It hangs just before I should read "uncompressing kernel", it just echoes the grub lines from the menu.lst.

I cannot boot a redhat in rescue mode, I'm stuck on a black screen with a blinking cursor, just after I type "linux rescue" at the prompt. I can boot a knoppix with kernel 2.4, but I only see sda after the boot.

There is no big options in the system bios, and I shouln't be making any changes here, since I just want to add 2 storage hdd's.

Using grub in command line generally causes grub to crash, or hang, I'm not sure. I get no results from a "geometry (hd1,0)" or "find /boot/grub/menu.lst".

Someone has any idea ?

I'm thinking your system is initializing the drive controllers in a different order than you want them to.. you expect the onboard controllers to be /dev/hda and /dev/hdb and the PCI Add in controller to be /dev/hdc and /dev/hde.

Could be that your motherboard BIOS is playing a dirty trick on you and initializing those interfaces in reverse order so when grub goes to boot, it ends up pointed to the drive attached to the PCI add in card instead of the controller on the motherboard. grub is hanging because it's not finding the drive it's looking for with the information it wants.

See if there are any options in your system BIOS that would affect what controller is initialized first.

If it's the case why doesn't it returns informations about the new disks on a grub shell when I type some commands ?

(I'll return in the bios as soon as my users have logged out)

To lift any doubts: at this point there is nothing I can do on a linux shell to solve this, right ?