On a DFI Lanparty using the Nvidia SATA ports with 2 Seagate 200GB SATA drives, the first
drive booting with AirBoot and Grub in the Linux partition, which is Fedora x64 and the
latest kernel. I tried adding a third 200GB SATA which caused a boot hangup at the word
"GRUB' I tried removing Drive 1 and adding AirBoot to drive 2 which contains all Linux
partitions with the same result. I made the new disk drive 1 with the same result. To
boot I must have the original drive 1 with the Linux drive as 2. No third disc is allowed
and I tried SATA and IDE.
This means if the first drive fails I have no Linux. If the second drive fails, I have no
Linux, and no way to install a third disk to clone my Linux partitions to. The first
drive is full HPFS which I cannot get rid of yet.
Since I can't boot with a different drive configuration, and the rescue CD does not help
is there any way to get booted up to Fedora with this drive attached to configure it?
Would having GRUB be the bootloader make a difference, and if so, could it be done after
the install in the Fedora partition?

Thank you in advance
Louis Muollo

Why can't you boot? Are you getting an error at the BIOS level or after when it tries to load an OS? If for example the disks aren't being recognised when the first is disconnected then it just sounds like you don't have the jumpers set correctly or something. I'm still using IDE drives (on the same mobo), do SATA drives use jumpers since they don't seem to work in a Master/Slave setup?

I'm done rambling, is the error in the BIOS or OS and whichever, what does it say exactly?

SATA drivers does not rely on jumpers.
You need to look the boot order in the BIOS and set the SATA drivers in the proper order.

The BIOS order was set at the new SATA as drive 3. OS/2 being drive 1 and Linux drive 2.
IDE and SATA do not get along with this setup which is why I got a new SATA to backup onto.
The system hands off OK to the boot manager, which starts GRUB. GRUB cannot load with the
new disk attached. I put the blank drive as #1 and installed Fedora on it, removed the OS/2
drive and now have Linux (Fedora x64 and SUSE 9.3 on 1, the original Linux installs on #2.
That will do for now. At least I know the easiest way is to put the new drive in place of the
replaced drive and load something on it to get going.

Specify labels while formating. SCSI device nodes changes, so by specifying labels for each partition will make your setup easier.

In order for the rescue CD to work with SATA. You need the nVidia module (driver) loaded.

Using GRUB as the bootloader makes it easier. If the setup is wrong, use GRUB's console to find out which device is the correct device. Probably easier to use an IDE device to store GRUB files.

You can use solid-state disks like disk on-chip. It connects to the IDE controller. The capacity ranges to a few megabytes to a few gigabytes. For GRUB, 16 MB will do fine, but Fedora developers like to use splash junk that is useless and takes up a lot space.

Thanks to all for the replies.
When installing an OS I allow it to format, and had no idea you could label an install partition.
To rephrase-the rescue CD loaded OK-I did not know what to do with it, and used the workaround described
above.
I used OS/2 Boot Manager for years and would never let anything else handle booting-but with LVM it was
stripped to code only. I used GRUB once, and when the Suse owner partition destroyed itself I could boot
to nothing and had to reactivate BM. I will always use a primary partition BM or an MBR third party
BM for this reason.
I'm going to look into USB drives for backup-might be easier.
Thanks again
Louis