FC2 on SATA no GRUB!

obiwanshinobi · 07-16-2004, 01:42 PM

Here's my problem--

I have a Dell Optiplex GX270 that came with a SATA pre-installed with Windows XP. I've kept it disconnected (I dropped a IDE in it that I've been running with mdk9.1) but since newer distros support SATA out of the box, I decided to hook it up and install Fedora Core 2 on the SATA.

My only problem is that when I install FC2, now, the boot loader (GRUB) won't come up. What happened here? Did I do the install wrong, somehow? It seemed to run flawlessly (on /dev/sda2) but now I can't get the computer to boot again unless I disable the SATA in the bios (which just boots mdk9.1 on hda1)

Anyone else with these problem? I've seen similar issues on the threads that have this issue with dual boot partitions, but the SATA only has one partition...

Thanks!

christopher5 · 07-17-2004, 03:52 PM

if your SATA controller is on your mobo, you might have problems. i could get any distro to work with mine, and ended up just disabling it and using a PATA hard drive. but on another computer, i have a SATA hard drive connected to a Silicon Image PCI SATA card, and it works fine....

ntrepid8 · 07-27-2004, 04:02 PM

I have an ASUS A7V8X with Promise 376 and two 80gb SATA drives. FC2 detects and installs fine. The problem comes on the first boot. My Computer hangs and gives the error message 'GRUB '. Thats it. I have heard some rumblings that it may be an LBA error but my controller has no way to edit this, cause the bios support isn't very good.

Does anyone else have a similar setup? Anyone got it working? I have a 3ware 8006 coming from new egg, but I'd rather just get it working on the hardware I currently have.

Thank,
ntrepid8

pfeito · 07-30-2004, 09:26 AM

Im planning to do a Fedora Core 1 installation on SATA hdds next week. I'll try to setup software raid on 4 250GB SATA drives, each pair connected to a SATA PCI controller (dont know which brand and model). Hope it does not give a big headache. Does Fedora Core 1 supports SATA (generally speaking) ?

ntrepid8 · 07-30-2004, 09:34 AM

I got mine working. The solution was to add an IDE hard disk for the GRUB boot loader to live on. The promise 376 bios doesnt support LBA addressing, and there is no way that I could find to make GRUB no use it either.

My Linux still lived on the SATA drives but had to boot from the IDE. From what I've found, cards that are true hardware RAID and support LBA work fine, but there are some problems with software raid cards like the promise 376.

Ntrepid

pfeito · 07-30-2004, 09:54 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by pfeito
Im planning to do a Fedora Core 1 installation on SATA hdds next week. I'll try to setup software raid on 4 250GB SATA drives, each pair connected to a SATA PCI controller (dont know which brand and model). Hope it does not give a big headache. Does Fedora Core 1 supports SATA (generally speaking) ?

I asked my colleague which told me that the SATA PCI controllers we will use in the installation is a Silicon Image SiI3x12 which seems to be fully supported by Fedora Core (1 and 2):

Quote:

You must use a kernel version of 2.4.18-14 or later to have SATA support for the SiI3x12. The open source Linux driver should be on the CD for the Linux distribution you have if your version already uses a kernel version later than 2.4.18-14.

ntrepid8 · 07-30-2004, 09:59 AM

I was using kernal 2.6 so the support in the OS was never a problem. It was a disk geometry issue with the GRUB boot loader. It failed with the error message 'GRUB '. LILO also failed with the error message 'L 99 99 99...'.

I think with the controller you mentioned you should be fine. The ones that give the most problems are the promise controllers.

ntrepid