How to include SATA-cdrom into GRUB menu (for chainloading)

devdol · 07-09-2009, 03:02 AM

If you have to boot from CDs quite often, you like to have an additional entry for a bootable CD in the grub menu. This way, one can conveniently boot from CD if the short period for pressing a key to boot from CD is over or BIOS is configured to boot from hd first.

In earlier times this was possible by some entry like

Code:

title Start from CD 
   rootnoverify (hdX)
   makeactive
   chainloader +1

However, this does not work for SATA devices.

info:grub tells us, that in an interactive grub shell "root([TAB-key]" will expand to a list of all known devices. Unfortunately, I'm left off with
"root(fd0 fd1 fd2 fd3 fd4 fd5 fd6 fd7 hd0" here. No device like (cd), (cd0) or something like that.

hd0, in this case, is an SATA harddisk, too (and this leaves hope that SATA cannot be a general problem at boot time).

Has anyone succeeded in finding a way to chainload from CD from GRUB's menu.lst with an SATA attached optical drive?

pljvaldez · 07-09-2009, 07:49 PM

Optical drives are not supported in grub-legacy. The new grub2 is supposed to allow for this, but I'm not sure if it does yet or not. You can chainload something like PLoP on a small partition and use that to boot from CD or USB.