I'm working with a Dell Edge 830, and trying to install RHEL 5.1 on it. The bios won't let me boot from the hard drive. In the bios, there is an option to choose the preferred order of boot devices. The hard drive doesn't show up. The bios does detect the hard drive, inside and outside the bios configuration. I've tried multipe sata, scsi, and ide drives, without any success. I can boot from usb, and have even made it through the RHEL installer. I've removed all pci and pci-e cards, and am now using an ide hd. The bios is up to date according to Dell's website, but I reflashed it anyway.

I've pretty much given up on fixing these problems (but if you can help here, I'd love it), and now I'm just trying to get around them so I can continue working.

A bootdisk has something like lilo on it so you can tell it which hard drive and kernel to use, right? Is it possible to make one for this machine without access to its OS?

I know the Slackware install discs let you boot into your system this way, but you have to use one of their kernels. Do you think it would work if I added my own kernel to the iso?

Thanks for any help.

You should be able to use a Super Grub Disk to boot the grub configuration you installed on the drive.

SGD looks useful, but I've managed to crash it dozens of times in the last couple hours. I keep getting dumped into an unexitable dialogue or failed boot. Even with the help enabled, I don't understand how to use it.

Trying to boot automatically gets me an "Error 15: File not found. Booting 'not lucky'. pause SGD has NOT done it (. SGD has NOT done it ("

Looking at the contents of the hard drive, I know grub is there.

Try following some of the things in the link "Saikee's Grub Booting Tips" in my signature. You can boot almost anything with a grub disk...

Very informative link. I tried geometry (hdX) for 0-15, and only the usb cdrom shows up, at hd2. Why wouldn't grub see it? Using other livecds, I can mount the the hard drive, and all the appropriate grub files appear to exist. And of course, the grub find commands fail.

That's really bizarre... Hmmm...

Is there a RAID array involved anywhere? Like a BIOS setting or was RHEL installed with RAID as the default? I'm not sure grub can read RAID partitions. It may make it easier if you create a small /boot partition of ext3 format.

That could well explain it. With only one hard drive, RAID isn't (or shouldn't be) used, but RHEL defaults to using LVM with a separate /boot. This time I didn't set up a separate /boot.