Grub smilies? after "native" installation of grub.
 

I've been having some trouble installing Debian to my tower for some weeks now. I currently have it installed on hda2, which is one of my three hard drives on my tower. I would ideally have it installed on my SATA drive I have, and not my primary IDE. I've tried installing Grub several times to each of my drives and I can only seem to get the primary to boot properly.

Just recently I installed GRUB natively (using the "native" instructions that are written in the GRUB manual), using Knoppix, and had peculiar results. I installed it to each drive and ordered my BIOS first to boot from my SATA, then my secondary, and finally my primary. Each time I got a series of black and white smilies falling from the top of the screen for about seven seconds and finally ending with one resting in the bottom right corner! I've searched the web and haven't found anyone talking about this. What is the deal with the smilies?! Has anyone seen that before?

Oh and if anyone has any tips on my GRUB problem that would be nice too. I did get it to boot from the primary again, and I believe that my next step is to look into chain loading...

I don't know about the rest of your problems, but you only need to chainload if you need to turn control over to a boot loader that is installed on some partition's boot sector, such as to boot MS Windows. I have also done this to turn control over to another instance of GRUB that I had installed on an individual partitions's boot sector (don't ask why! :) ).

So, I've been wrestling with installing a working GRUB on any of my other disk drives other that my primary for weeks now, and I finally solved the problem. I diconnected both of my IDE drives and left my SATA drive connected, reinstalled Debian, my OS of choice!, and let the Debian installer do the GRUB work for me. With only one drive connected it installed GRUB on just that drive and not the primary IDE as before. I still do not know why I had so much trouble booting my SATA from my primary IDE MBR but I suppose it's water under the bride at this point. Thanks for all the help!