newly installed feisty unbootable on desktops with harddrives connected to add-on PCI IDE controller card

[Wenzhuo Zhang]

I tried to install feisty RC several days before its final release on an old desktop computer. After seemingly smooth and successful installation, the computer could not load Grub because it had been installed on the tertiary master hard drive connected to an add-on PCI IDE controller card.

The desktop is an HP XE310 (i815eg moetherboard), and the add-on PCI IDE controller is a Promise Ultra100 TX2. The desktop has two hard drives. One is connected to the motherboard as primary master, and the other is connected to a Promise Ultra100 TX2 IDE controller card as tertiary master.

The feisty live-cd, on the first boot, recognized the primary boot drive as /dev/sdb, and the tertiary master as
/dev/sda. I chose to install feisty onto the 4th primary partition of the tertiary master drive. By default, Ubiquity installed Grub onto (hd0), which was the tertiary hard drive in this session. Therefore, Grub got installed onto the wrong drive, and the computer BIOS couldn't load it.

I manually loaded Grub on the tertiary harddrive using a Grub floppy, and found the root partition of the Grub recipe for feisty mistakely pointed to (hd0,3). It wouldn't work without manually changing the root partition to (hd1,3), because in Grub's terminology, (hd0) is the first boot drive, which was not the drive I installed feisty in.

Later tests show that the sequence of the hard drives detected by the feisty kernel is unpredictable on this desktop. See attached dmesg and lspci output.

[Lionel Patoureau (brain-jam)]

Hello,

I had the same problem with Mandriva 10, but I solved it when I set the boot sequence by loading first the hd in the Promise ide controller as well as I installed grub or lilo on that same hd. Not on the master of the motherboard's ide controller.

Try it

[Wenzhuo Zhang (wenzhuo)]

Lionel Patoureau wrote:
> I had the same problem with Mandriva 10, but I solved it when I set the
> boot sequence by loading first the hd in the Promise ide controller as
> well as I installed grub or lilo on that same hd. Not on the master of
> the motherboard's ide controller.

I solved it by fist booting from a Grub floppy, and then manually
installing Grub on the MBR of the primary master hard drive, and
fixing menu.lst.

The BIOS of my desktop computers cannot boot from hard drives other
than the boot drive C:.

Wenzhuo

[Wenzhuo Zhang (wenzhuo)]

One user who experienced the same problem posted on the ubuntu-users mailing list:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2007-June/116096.html

His setup is SATA and SCSI combination. But I think the root cause is the same.

Considering gutsy has already reached alpha milestone, can someone please confirm the bug?