[SOLVED] Grub & 2 hard drives; the Troubles I have...

linus72 · 11-21-2009, 07:59 AM

Well
its not really a problem now..

But; I wanted members opinions on whats going on with my installs?

OK; I got a Emachines (unknown model) like homebuilt PC with Nvidia everything, motherboard,etc
geforce mx4000 I think
This is the PC I make all my remasters on you see here or at my site

like 768MB ram
and 2 hard drives
here's my fdisk -l

Code:

Disk /dev/sda: 164 GB, 164694781440 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 20023 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System 
/dev/sda1   *           1          79      634536   83  Linux
/dev/sda3              80        4895    38676487   83  Linux
/dev/sda4            4896        9868    39937590   83  Linux
/dev/sda2            9869       20023    81562005    5  Extended
/dev/sda6            9869       14877    40226760   83  Linux
Warning: Partition 6 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda7           14878       15750     7004340   83  Linux
Warning: Partition 7 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda9           15751       17406    13293787   83  Linux
Warning: Partition 9 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda8           17407       19740    18739822   83  Linux
Warning: Partition 8 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda5           19741       20023     2265165   82  Linux swap
Warning: Partition 5 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Disk /dev/sdb: 80 GB, 80023749120 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System 
/dev/sdb1               1        9320    74862868   83  Linux
/dev/sdb2   *        9321        9729     3277260   83  Linux

what a mess huh?!
LOL

Anyway; the problem started when I installed
Fedora 12 to sdb2
sdb previous to this had no Grub installed
Grub was only installed to sda
and sdb was storage

I made a small partition on sdb (sdb2)
to install Fedora 12 to

Install went OK
and I rebooted to find that my drives had become
Reversed!

Grub thinks sdb is hd0
and sda is hd1
??

So, I had to reverse all my menu.lst's on most of my partitions
for example
I have Ubuntu-9.04 on sda3, which was (hd0,2)

Now, sda3 is (hd1,2)

??

I have fixed all the grub menus and everything boots as it should...

Should I reverse my drives so that sda becomes sdb and vice versa
or leave it be??

linus72 · 11-21-2009, 08:39 AM

SOLVED!

It seems my BIOS had the boot device as hd1 and not hd0
I never messed with the BIOS before..

Anyway; I set the boot device to hd0
and then I had to again change my menu.lst's back to how they should be
I had already made backups

so, all is well in Multidistro land again