I've just put slackware 12 on a new machine. Grub fails to see the hard drive. In the past, I have used grub as the boot loader. it's always worked for me and I've never been able to figure out lilo. The following commands (in grub) always worked for me:
The above sets grub up on a hard drive whose (linux) boot partition is /dev/hda6.

This now fails. Specifically, the first command yeilds the following error message: "Error 21: selected drive does not exist."

Why? The machine has only one hard drive, which is SATA. There is also a dvd drive. There are no other drives to confuse grub, not even a floppy.

Now the actual questions:

• Does grub handle sata? man page and info file for grub make no mention of SATA. My web searches indicate that grub works with sata but my own experiments are contradicting that.
• If grub does actually handle SATA drives, what is the actual root command to type to get grub to use /dev/sda6 in its "root" partition?
• Is there a command to list the drives/partitions that grub "sees" so that I can get the names of them to then type them in the grub "root" command? The info file that comes with grub indicates that hitting "tab" after typing "root (" should do this but this does not happen.
• In these modern times, what boot loader will work with SATA drives?

GRUB definitely supports SATA drives. If you're using the GRUB that came with Slackware (in extra/), you should have no problems. If you're using the GRUB from another distro, you *may* have to switch to Slackware's GRUB if you're using an ext2/ext3 filesystem formatted with Slackware's installer, since GRUB has to be patched to handle the now default 256-byte inode size (instead of 128 bytes).

I think the problem is more likely your menu.lst syntax -- but I'm afraid you'll have to wait for someone else for help on that, since I don't use GRUB. A search for GRUB in the forums should help you immensely.

Although I can provide no help to you, I just thought I should post a quick reply saying that SATA is NOT the problem.

As already mentioned - yes - I use it on a SATA drive.
your command looks fine to me.
you could try find /boot/grub/menu.lst from the grub prompt.
I have had both grub and lilo work fine.

Another idea would be to try the grub-install script that comes with Slackware.

Edit : With hindsight - as you may not have grub installed you may be better with find /boot/vmlinux or something to find what boot partitions grub reports.

It's the grub that comes with slack12, already installed in the grub directory of the boot partition.

Tried the "find" command within grub. Nothing. grub is definitely not seeing the hard drive.

Grub don't like sata, or at least doesn't like my hardware, which amounts to the same thing.

(and the hardware works, cause windows boots off it and runs fine)

update:

downloaded a grub cd image. burned it and ...

Grub on the CD can see the HD that slack 12's grub does not.

Something in slackware 12's grub is broken.

booting into windows from this grub cd works OK.

booting into slackware 12 causes a reboot without prompt (ie, not a kernel panic). odd, very odd. A theory: version mismatch between the stages on the HD vs the stages on the cd. I hate mixign versions.

I don't know what to do now.

Maybe something to do with your BIOS settings ?
It is weird that it reboots without prompt, I would think it is hardware related, but I don't know
Anyway, grub query BIOS for drive infos, so I would check every BIOS settings

Also, maybe post motherboard infos (model, brand), it would help

I had some grub related problems too. I was using grub that came with slacks from 12.0 and earlier. I noticed a new one that either came with slack 12.1 or from the current directory. Installing the new one helped. I'm using grub 0.97 from package: grub-0.97-i486-6.tgz

If you are using something earlier try this.

Very strange ... I got slackware 12's grub to see the HD. Apparently, if you chroot into the mounted drives to then run grub, the drive is not visible to Grub. If you instead just mount the partition where the grub program is (the partition that has /usr/bin/grub (or was it /usr/sbin/grub?)) and cd there and run grub thusly (direct and not in a chroot)
then grub will see the hard drive. So ...

• sata was not the problem. slack 12's grub is fine with sata
• grub won't see a drive that's mounted as part of a chroot-ed directory tree
• grub is now on my HD and it can be used to boot to windows
• grub can be used to boot to linux
• linux seems to have a problem with its sudden reboot. That's off topic to this thread. so I'll be putting it in a separate thread if i can't puzzle it out.