# Cannot boot from HD with grub -- drive naming changing?

## rgbtxus

I have a ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe MB with 4 Sil SATA Raid ports and 4 Nv SATA ports.  /boot is the first partition on hda (and sdb which is hda's RAID1 twin). When I was using all the Nv ports, and none of the Sil ports grub was happy as a clam.  Much to my annoyance when I needed a 5th SATA drive and used a Sil port the drives were enumerated differently.  Didn't really matter much since they came after the PATA drives and hda was my boot drive and the rest of the drives are LVM2 or RAID1 volumes so they are picked up automatically.  Funny thing though, now booting never gets to grub.  Just hangs with a black screen -- not a peep from grub, which I assume is not getting invoked successfully.  The grub config seems fine (and I did recompile and reinstall it just for good measure).  In fact, if I boot a grub floppy and do the same root (hd0,0),  kernel ... lines as in the /boot partition on hda1 it boots up fine.  Also, if I pull the Sil HD, it boots from hda just fine.  Lastly, after booting from a floppy with the Sil drive on, grubs find finds the boot drive/partition just where it should be according to the running system and the grub.conf. Finally (which I guess comes after lastly), grub/device.map looks right. 

It smells like somehow the BIOS is looking in the wrong place.  Googling around for this problem turned up some similar sounding complains, but I didn't see  any solution.  I suppose I can stab in the dark somemore and try set things like LBA mode manually, but it does boot just fine with the auto setting if the Sil drive is pulled.  Can anyone point me in the right direction -- I really hate booting from floppy (which I almost didn't build into this system) and then typing the kernel line just right <G> (yeah, I know I can put it in the floppy)

TIA

----------

## desultory

Check the boot priorities in the BIOS, the Sil ports might be probed before the other ports. If that is the case, the BIOS is simply trying to boot the drive with highest precedence and so it boots to the drive on the Sil SATA port which lacks a boot loader so, essentially, nothing happens.

----------

## rgbtxus

Thanks for the thought, but I think its a dry hole in this case.  The BIOS lets you set any drive to be the boot drive and I have selected the correct drive which I can confirm because the BIOS identifies the boot drives by model number.  Also, thinking as you did, I used the BIOS feature (hit F8 on power up) to bring up a list of all hard drives and chose which one to boot.  Of course I tried each in turn with no effect.  Still I fear your comment might be correct and what i'm really looking at is a BIOS bug.  If this were to be the case I guess I could cheat death by just putting a boot partition on the Sil RAID drive and grubbing it.  Unfortunately, this disk is a member of a RAID which means I can't just rejigger its partitons, i'd have to do the same to its buddies all the while being careful not to kill the data it holds.  Perhaps, since /boot is a RAID1, I can swap cables around and plug what is now sdb on the Nv controller into the Sil controller instead.  Humm, good thought, I'll give that a try when I can conveniently reboot.  Thank you for input.  Meanwhile, If anyone else has any insight into this issue I would sure welcone it.

----------

## Darknight

I'm having the same problem with an all intel solution. The system just won't boot off the sata hard drive, no matter what.

I am sure I have installed grub correctly, I even tried to reissue the install commands with a grub floppy just to be sure that the devices were not being renamed at boot time/kernel time.

Now I'm booting with the grub floppy, the livecd is ok too but sda just won't make me boot.

I suspect it's the bios... it's not recognizing the grub mbr as valid imho...

----------

## desultory

Try to use the most basic BIOS options, amongst those which pertain to the drive and the interface, in an attempt to keep the BIOS from outsmarting itself.

----------

## madisonicus

I have this same board and had this problem until I saw another booting option.  At post, try pressing F8 to get to the BBS POPUP.  Select the SATA drive from there.  I boot off an IDE drive, so I'm not sure whether it will stick from boot to boot, but it should be what you need.

HTH,

m

----------

## Darknight

I solved my problem, it never happened before to me but grub had not set it root partition as active...

I didn't check at first because it always "just worked"  :Rolling Eyes: 

----------

