Hi!
I have recently installed a new hard drive(a Seagate Barracuda) and set my old hard drive as the master. When I boot, my grub boot-screen appears properly and I have no problems if I boot into my Windows installation, but when I boot into my Fedora Core 3 installation, it stops after printing a couple of lines after "Press 'I' for interactive startup" (or something similar) and says it can't start because of problems with the filesystem, and drops me to a shell. With my little knowledge and typing 'help' every third time, I figured out that my old hard-drive became /dev/hdb now(using fdisk). Previously, it used to be /dev/hda, and my Fedora installation was on /dev/hda3. So, I am not able to boot into my Fedora installation.
Can someone tell me how I can make the system recognize that my old hard-drive is /dev/hda and the new one must be /dev/hdb?

Thanks,
Yanewbie.

Hi,


I could tell you that a quick fix would be using a LiveCD, mount hdb3 using that livecd and then chrooting to hdb3 to modify the /etc/fstab file so you can have something like:

Instead of:


But....


You should check the connections you've made, are you really sure that you set the old-hard drive as master? because the problem, as you showed, says otherwise.

It could happen if the new drive is a S-ATA, (AFAIK) sata drives are loaded first than ata drives.

Also, if you can, using the livecd you can use fdisk -l and post the results, will be great, that will let us know your current hd setup.



Regards

Hi Acron,

I did a 'cat /etc/fstab | grep hda3' and came up with nothing in the output. The first line of my fstab file says:
LABEL=/1 / ext3 defaults 1

It's written in the forum advice that model no.s make no sense, but anyway, my old HD is a Seagate Barracuda ST380011A, which is an "Ultra ATA" HD, and the new one is a Seagate Barracuda ST3320620AV which also an "Ultra ATA".

If my old hd is the master, I boot to the old grub boot-screen, but if my new hd is the master, I directly boot into the Windows installation on it. Since the grub screen is coming up, I guessed that the old hd is the master right now. I put the jumper on the second slot from the left on the new drive(I read that you ought to put the jumper on the first slot from the left on the drive you intend to be the master, but this doesn't seem to work somehow in my case: it seems to boot into the new hd's Windows installation if I do this.) However, if I look at the BIOS, it says my new drive is the PATA Primary Master and the old drive is the PATA Primary Slave. I don't understand this since I boot into the grub screen.Do you think exchanging the data cables will do the trick?

Sorry if all this is confusing.

I did a 'fdisk -l' in the shell I was dropped to and this is what I came up with:
******************************************************
Disk /dev/hda: 320.0 GB, <blah> bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = <blah blah>

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * <blah blah>
/dev/hda2 <blah blah>
/dev/hda5 <blah blah>
/dev/hda6 <blah blah>
/dev/hda7 <blah blah>

Disk /dev/hdb: 80.0 GB, <blah> bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * <blah blah> FAT32(LBA)
/dev/hdb2 <blah blah> Ext'd(LBA)
/dev/hdb3 <blah blah> Linux
/dev/hdb4 <blah blah> Linux swap
/dev/hdb5 <blah blah> FAT32
/dev/hdb6 <blah blah> FAT32
/dev/hdb7 <blah blah> FAT32
******************************************************
(Sorry about this output... I had to type this since I can't paste the output since the root drive is being mounted readonly in the shell to which I am being dropped: in fact, this is another mystery to me: it seems to be mounting the root drive alright, and then during the boot process, it says couldn't find /dev/hda3 and drops me to a shell)

I know that my old hd is 80 GB and the new hd is 320 GB, and I know that the second disk's partition layout is the old hd's layout.

What do you think the problem is?

Thanks,
yanewbie

Odd...


Let see, first, I want to have something clear

When you say 'cat /etc/fstab | grep hda3' you're doing that after the chroot right? I know, silly question but I just want to know if you aren't checking the fstab of the liveCD instead of the fstab of your hard drive. If that's not the case and you're doing cat after being chrooted in the mounted linux partition, you could still try to edit the fstab and change LABEL=1 to /dev/hdb3

If the BIOS is showing the new drive as the primary master, something is wrong with the connections, you could try to remove the jumper in the new hard drive, turn on the machine and check if the BIOS is still saying that the new hard drive is the primary master, also, check that the old drive is jumped as Master.

I know, the grub thing is weird and I really can come up with and idea to that right now to be honest, but anyway, you can still try the things I've said to check.



Regards