Booting with multiple hard drives
 

Hi,
I recently thought I'd like to add my old Win98 hard disk to my linux box so I could occasionally boot off of it to play old games. I've been playing around with different configs and I'm getting inconsistant results. I've done some googling, but I've not seen a definitive answer so I'm coming here.

My original setup was:
(all drives IDE)
Primary Master: Linux HD
Primary Slave: DVD
Secondary Master: CDRW
Secondary Slave: Zip drive

I tried swapping the win98 HD in for the Zip drive.
I set the jumpers on the HD to be slave and I put this stanza in my grub.conf:
title W98
rootnoverify (hd3,0)
map (hd0) (hd3)
map (hd3) (hd0)
chainloader +1

It didn't work. It said the drive didn't exist.

I tried putting it in place of the DVD (Primary Slave). I changed the hd3's to hd 1's in the grub.conf and everything worked fine.

So my questions are:
1) Is it just not possible to boot Win98 off of the secondary IDE controller?
2) Am I missing something obvious?
3) Both?

check when U get a chance this
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=237511

2 the hd order is normally in bios order, if there is no defined device.map file

3 in ide speak you have
/dev/hda linux
/dev/hdb DVD
/dev/hdc burner
/dev/hdd w98 jumpered as a slave

4 so from the link
su
grub
root (hd AND PRESS THE TAB to see what the devices grub detects are.....I suspect its simply that hd3 was not the w98.

you could just type AMENDED
root (hd1,0)
then keep doing it but replacing hd1 with 2 etc until it reports a vfat drive

BUT U have only 2 drives so it should be hd1

Sounds good. I will read through your links and then try this out. Since all of my drives are referred to as hdX in "IDE speak" I just figured I needed to count them that way in "GRUB speak." I think i will have a couple more questions, but I want to try this initial fix first.

no worries I have started a more colourful howto thread here
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...postid=1413211

Well this has been a bit bizare. I changed my grub.conf to use hd(1,0) instead of hd(3,0) and put the second HD back on the secondary IDE bus. I rebooted and it seemed the BIOS lost it. I couldn't boot to Win98 because it kept reporting that the drive didn't exist. I played around at the grub command line like you said and it still only reported 1 HD.

I rebooted and went into the BIOS and it showed nothing on the secondary slave. I was thinking that I must have a screwed up IDE contoller or cable but went ahead and booted into Linux anyway. When I checked, I was able to access the second HD with no problem. I could mount it, copy files off of it, the works. When I rebooted again, it again did not show up in the BIOS and still would not let me boot to Win98.

I powered down and swapped the DVD to the SS and put HD2 on PS. Now the BIOS doesn't see the DVD, but I can boot to Win98 no problem. Win98 has no problem seeing the DVD even though the BIOS did. I rebooted to linux and it also has no problems with the drive.

I'm getting quite puzzled. I'm also a little worried about this setup because I suspect that I won't be able to boot from CD using the DVD drive.