DescentBB

None of this is life-threatening, but I would like to know what's going on. The motherboard has one IDE port and there is a nonbootable PCI card that adds another two. I use Fedora Core. The Linux hard drive is IDE and the Windows hard drive is SATA. Here's the list of symptoms that may be linked in some way:

1: The Linux hard drive has spontaneously stopped booting properly. Instead of a GRUB menu, I get the prompt. This happened just after I made a modification to grub.conf. I booted into Windows and removed the modification, but the prompt remains.

2: When a CD drive and the Linux hard drive are connected directly to the motherboard, the Linux installer boots from the CD, but then asks where the installation media is instead of just regularly installing. All of the Fedora CD's that I've collected over the years do this same thing. In addition, when a CD drive is connected to the motherboard along with the hard drive, Windows does not detect the CD drive. This happens with either CD drive and either IDE cable. It happens regardless of jumper settings.

3: When one CD drive is connected to the motherboard and the other is connected to the add-on card, the BIOS does not distinguish between them. When the computer first starts booting it detects the CD drive connected to the motherboard, then the add-on card detects its CD drive, but then the BIOS only lists one CD drive, and calls it \"Ç\". This also happens regardless of jumper settings.

Thank you.

As far as the CD's not being seen correctly, it has more to do with the add-in card's BIOS than anything else. Not much you can do there.

The grub boot poblem is interesting. Add-in cards screw with Linux's drive naming system, though again, it has more to do with the card's BIOS. At one point, I had Linux running on a machine that had the two mobo ports, a two-port add-in IDE card, and a two-port SATA card. Originally, the mobo ports were hda, hdb, hdc, and hdd. The first add-in card I put in became those drives, so the mobo ports automagically became hde, hdf, hdg, and hdh. Then when I added the SATA card, thing got alittle stickier... SATA drives \"look\" like regular IDE to the OS, but they only have one drive per channel. So then the SATA card was hda, and hdc, and the other card was hde - hdh, and the mobo became hdi - hdl.

Anyway, to fix this: grub has a drive mapping setting, in the /boot/grub/device.map file. This basically tell grub which drive is \"home\", and you may have to point it to the right one for it to find the boot image it's looking for. Don't trust bootable CDs, because they use floppy emulation, and it sometimes screws drive naming up. Do some reading about Grub, and see if you can get it going. Shouldn't be too hard. Let us know how it works.

Thank you. It works now. It turned out that the card had nothing to do with it, but there were two other problems. One was that the partition table on the Linux hard drive spontaneously self-destructed. The other problem was that GRUB thought that the hard drives were hda and sda, when they were really sda and sdb. Now all I need to do is wait until Fedora 7 comes out.

Good job, Nega. Just out of curiosity, what package manager are you using for Fedora? It sure would be sweet to see some screentshots, too.