Hi All,

I want to see how good Umbunto is, so I tried to install it in a dual boot with windows, but have got a bit stuck. Windows is on the Main IDE (hda) drive and linux is going onto a SATA drive, (sda6). OK fine.

However for various reasons I do not want to put Grub onto the IDA boot block, but onto the SATA one.

Umbunto insists that it wants to put grub onto hd0. But does not give me any clue as to what it thinks the sata drive boot block is called.

Could someone please tell me. Have tried sda and sd0 without any luck.

Many thanks

John.

I will try and clarify some things for you.

You said windows is on 'hda' I'm sure in will be on 'hda1' in linux speak. hda is the drive, but does not refer to any particular partition. hda1 is the primary partition on the first drive.

You said you want to put grub on the sata drive. You can; and get it to boot, but understand, you will need some way of getting the boot process to look at grub. This is very non-standard way of doing things. I believe the only way I can think of is to modify one of your windows files to go to grub. Not at all sure you could get that working.

The way booting works, is BIOS goes and reads the 'mba' master boot record, this is where you would normally install grub. Grub gets set up to give you options, go to the windows system to boot, or go to linux to boot. I have no idea why you don't want to go this route, it does work well enough. The only fly in the ointment is if you re-install windbloze, after you have installed linux. Windbloze will overwrite the mba with its own boot record. You can re-do grub if that happens after a windoze install.

As for what your sata drive is called, probably it is called 'sda1'. That would be the first drive, and first partition. If that doesn't work, try sda2. Linux assigns the last digit for primary partitions on an assending basis, 1 is on hda, but I'm not sure if it enforces that across different drive types.

Hi Cliff,

The reason I want to do this is that the windows boot loader is on hda's boot block and has a recovery option on it. So I don't want grub to overwrite it and potentially loose the ability to run the recovery. My bios has a boot menu (thump esc at startup) which will allow me to boot from any drive connected (excluding firewire ones for some reason).

So I can get the pc to boot onto the sata drive, but when I come to install grub as part of Umbuntu the only option it gives is hd0, which I guess is actually hda1 since Grub numbers everything from 0. I did wonder if the sata drive would be hd1 as I read somewhere that Grub does not distinguish between sata and ide drives, but I'm wary that the Umbunto installer might think I want to stick grub onto hda2, which is an NTFS partition and probably won't appreciate it.

The sata drive only has logical partitions, so / is on sda6 and swap on sda7. There is a fat32 partition at sda5.

Not sure if the extra info helps.

Many thanks for the reply

John.

Take one sledgehammer....

I disconnected the windows (ide drive) and reinstalled Umbuntu. Now there was no way that the installer could put grub onto the windows drive 'cos it wasn't there. It still only gave the option hd0, which given that there was only one drive is ok. Install went fine.

I then re-connected the ide drive. Expecting that I would have to edit the menu.lst fro grub. But that as not needed. It turns out that Umbuntu was detection the sata drive as hd0 and the ide drive as hd1. But the bios detects the ide drive first! Nasty.

The remedy (if any of the umbuntu guys read this forum is to put a proper requester in the installer so the poor user knows exactly which drive grub is going on. Can't be hard both Suse and Mandriva do.

let's have a look at /boot/grub/device.map

There's very little in there.

(hd0) /dev/sda

That's all. I guess as I only had the sata drive connected on install as I was not sure what grub was calling it and the ide drive.

John.