[lug] Grub configuration

[John Karns]

On Fri, 4 Apr 2003, Andy Jolley said:

> I have a scrounged PC with SCSI HD and CD, and am running out of space.
> I have scrounged up an 4gb IDE drive.
> When I add the IDE drive, grub views the new drive as HD0 and my SCSI
> drive as HD1.  No real surprise there.
>
> When I would boot I would get the grub prompt, and when I would type
> root (hd1,0)
> kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-19.7.x ro root=/dev/sda5
> initrd /initrd-2.4.18-19.7.x.img
> boot
>
> The system would fire up correctly.
>
> Now, thinking I was smart (I'm a newbie at mucking around with grub at
> this level by the way) I changed my grub.conf file to point to (hd1,0)
> instead of (hd0,0).  Well that didn't work.

If it's an older machine, as it seems to be from your description, one
trick is to set the machines bios to ignore the ide drive.  Then I believe
it should function as it did before.  The bios plays a role in the boot
process for IDE hd's but after that, Linux doesn't need the BIOS to access
the drive - so if you don't want to use it as the boot device the bios
setting is extraneous.  With many of the newer mobos, the bios allows one
to select scsi as the primary boot option.

----------------------------------------------------------------
John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net