hi,

i am having problems installing grub on my sata wd raptor. my mobo is an asus a7n8x deluxe. i have an ide harddrive as a primary master, on which i have installed linux, and a sata drive on which windows is installed. in my bios i had to set the boot option to 'scsi' so that my computer boots from my sata drive (windows) and not the ide harddisk.

linux installation's all good. all hardware is properly configured. my ide drive shows up as /dev/hda and sata shows up as /dev/sda. when i try to do,

grub-install /dev/sda

it happens without any error and grub outputs the contents of device.map file, which are as follows:

(hd0) /dev/hda
(hd1) /dev/sda

which is correct.

the problem begins when i reboot my computer. the system hangs on boot and i don't see the grub menu at all. all i see is grub written at the bottom of the screen. that's it.

btw on my sata drive (windows drive), i have only two partitions, both of which are ntfs.

kindly help me sort out this problem. thanks a lot.

Try using grub-install -v /dev/sda. That is the verbose option (-v). Might give a little insight. So you're trying to put GRUB on your Raptor that has winblows on it... are you nuts!? Anyhow, GRUB is probably hanging because it dosen't know what to do. Infact, it might not even be frozen. Try ctrl+c to get a command line.

If I were you, I would set BIOS to boot from the IDE, and have GRUB in the master boot record on that drive. From there, use GRUB to select what OS you want to launch. Go RTFM (read the ****ing manual) on GRUB =)

hey,

thanks. yah i figured it out yesterday, but only got the time to reply today. i had grub installed on my primary ide master. so i am now booting from the ide drive, and from there i am chainloading to my sata windows. no need to install grub on my sata drive.

atharh

I don't know if you are still following this thread but well done in figuring it out.

1) Lets call your mbrs ....
mbr-ide
mbr-Sata

It is possible to have grub on both mbrs.

2) If you are willing, try a different way of installing but b4 you do,
test that your windows has a floppy or cd rescue system.
I am familar with w98 but not xp or 2K.

BTW even if it aint broke it is good to know how to rescue.

With luck your windows has its own bootloader in mbr-sata but chainloads to the hidden next sector or chainloads to the first partition AKA C drive.

3) what I propose is that you have grub on both mbrs mbr-ide will chainload sata
mbr-sata will chainload itself and boot linux.

Then if one fails you change your bios to the other way.

If you are not scared by my terms or proposals, post back when you have tested your rescue and post what flavour of windows you have and your linux file called /etc/fstab and we can proceed???