Here's my setup...

DFI Ultra II LanParty motherboard

2x 160gig SATA drives (sda, sdb)
2x 300gig standard IDE drives (hda, hdb)

I made a mistake and accidentally formatted the 2x 300 gig drives during an OS install. I have some very important data on these drives I need to recover. Luckily I haven't written anything on the drives after formatting.

Basically I have these 2x 160 gig SATA drives that I can use to install an OS on and I need to boot from them. If I JUST have the SATA drives in my machine and install Ubuntu, I can boot and have no problems.

If I have either of the standard IDE drives installed, Grub won't boot. For example, lets say I have the following drives connected and setup:

Ubuntu installed on sda
Nothing on sdb
Nothing on hda

Install ubuntu, restart, Grub will come up but say that there is nothing on the partitions.

I can have just sda and sdb installed, then install ubuntu, and boot with no problems.

It doesn't make any sense to me. Does anyone have any ideas?

The drive order is changing - you can probably fix this in the device.map and reinstall grub.

If you are only looking to recover, just use a liveCD, then the problem no longer exists. You can even run from memory, and release the CD drive is you have enough memory.

Thanks for the reply. I'm just getting back into using linux after a 3 year absence, so I'm a little rusty. Care to go into more detail on how to perform the tasks you recommended?

i just wonder how or what to do with the live cd to the device.map. Can you get more specific like 'command' from the terminal. because i also got this Grub error as well. How do i fix this the error and able to boot my Ubuntu

My system is quite similar to the problem described (i have 1 Sata, 2 Pata drives). I installed Windows in Sata, Mandriva in (PATA IDE) hda, Ubuntu in (PATA IDE) hdb
My bios boot is 1) Sata 2)IDE 200gb (hda) 3) IDE 80gb (hdb). I hope i can fix the problem. Thanks

What I think is happening is something like this:
- only S-ATA drives in, they are drives 0 and 1. No problem.
- add the P-ATA (aka IDE) drives, and the BIOS reconises them as drives 0 and 1 - the S-ATA get moved to 2 and 3, and this is how grub will now see them.

If you are only looking to do data recovery, I would use a liveCD - I use Knoppix, but there are special recovery liveCDs out there.
This avoids any embarrasing mess-ups during a (potentially) unnecessary install.

If you want/need to install a Linux distro, make the S-ATA drive of choice your BIOS bootdrive, and then start the install, with all drives installed. Grub should be fine after that.
If not, you will need to adjust /boot/device.map, but that shouldn't be needed.

@thtr2k, you should probably start a new thread. Will need more info - which loader are you using (Windoze, grub ??), is any systems bootable - things like that.

I want to install linux. My BIOS is a little confusing in that it just lets me specify the boot order as HD-0, HD-1, HD-2, HD-3, etc. I don't really have any way of telling which drive is which in the bios.

So, I've tried installing Ubuntu with ALL drives plugged in. The install is fine, but when I reboot and it gets to Grub, it just says "GRUB GRUB GRUB" etc over and over, repeating.

How do I go about getting to my device.map if I boot off of the live cd? Any other ideas?