[lug] grub.conf and BIOS drive specifications

[D. Stimits]

...
> You can work around it by having a separate boot partition on IDE0, install
> grub to that. Keep the BIOS boot order as IDE,SCSI and have the BIOS always
> boot to the IDE0 boot partition. Then you have several sections in the
> grub.conf on IDE0. Keep all the kernel and system map files in the boot
> partition.
...
Unfortunately I can't do that...the IDE and the SCSI are all removeable. 
The IDE works as a rescue and test system, and as a big floppy. The scsi 
is more likely to be used as a /boot/, but unfortunately sometimes 
experimentation means the one with the /boot/ gets yanked as well.

Is there no way to query the bios to find out what hex value it thinks 
each drive is? If I could query it maybe I could figure out a workable 
combination. I know there is a config option to assign a given bios hex 
value (like 0x80) to be hd0 or hd1 or whatever...but I don't know how to 
find this information on this system, and I'm not willing to risk 
harming it. I'm starting to think of switching back to LILO, but I'm not 
sure that'd be any better...grub is certainly a lot less of a pain for 
many things.

D. Stimits, stimits AT comcast DOT net