New motherboard with SATA and PATA won't boot linux from PATA

centosian · 08-13-2006, 10:11 AM

I'm really stumped here. I recently bought an Abit KN8-SLI which has 4 SATA controllers and 2 IDE controllers. No matter what I've tried I simply cannot boot linux(centos or debian) from the PATA controller. The controller is fine because I can boot my old WinXP PATA drive on it. I can boot linux from a second SATA drive but I really need to boot from PATA.

I've tried the following:

#1. WinXP on first SATA(sda), Debian on master PATA(hda) first primary IDE channel. I did a fresh install of Debian and it detected WinXP on the SATA drive and made a grub entry for it and a grub-install but when I boot up I just get a fat ugly error "grub read error".

#2. Centos on master PATA(hda) primary IDE channel, no other drives installed. This drive boots just fine in my old computer on the primary IDE channel but on the Abit I get a DISK FAILURE DEVICE NOT AVAILABLE.

In the BIOS I've tried everything I can think of to get this to work. I have an old WinXP on PATA and it boots just fine so it's not the controller itself. There's something with grub that is causing it to get confused when it boots linux on PATA and I don't know what it is.

Here's the relevant parts of /boot/grub/menu.lst from a fresh debian install using scenario #1.

Code:

title       Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.8-2-386
root        (hd0,0)
kernel      /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8-2-386 root=/dev/hda1 ro
initrd      /boot/initrd.img-2.6.8-2-386
savedefault
boot

title       Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.8-2-386 (recovery mode)
root        (hd0,0)
kernel      /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8-2-386 root=/dev/hda1 ro single
initrd      /boot/initrd.img-2.6.8-2-386
savedefault
boot

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian
# ones.
title       Other operating systems:
root


# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/sda1
title       Windows NT/2000/XP (loader)
root        (hd1,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

Thanks for any help you can offer

Emerson · 08-13-2006, 10:27 AM

Check your /boot/grub/device.map file. GRUB probably got your drive mapping wrong.

centosian · 08-13-2006, 11:42 AM

I don't see anything fishy.

I see for situation #1

(hd0) /dev/hda
(hd1) /dev/sda

And for situation #2

(hd0) /dev/hda

centosian · 08-14-2006, 10:19 AM

Argh, to make things worse, any kind of PATA drive with linux on it will cause a grub error no matter what kind of configration I have. This is driving me nuts.

For instance I had WinXP on the first sata, Debian on the 2nd sata... no problem boots just fine and I get the grub screen. But just by adding another linux drive on the first PATA I got the grub error crap again and couldn't boot from sata.

Emerson · 08-14-2006, 10:24 AM

Workaround might be to use another bootloader. For Linux you can install GRUB on partition and use another loader as GAG to chainload it. Or try LILO.