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4537
February 25th, 2004 23:00
4600 SATA and IDE drive on Mandrake Linux...
My Dell Dimension 4600 came with a 40GB IDE drive.
I added a WD 250GB SATA drive (enabled it in the BIOS) and installed Mandrake 9.2 on the IDE drive. During the Mandrake install, I saw the SATA drive, but didn't partition it at the time. Everything worked fine (couple of weeks) until I formatted, partitioned and tried to mount the SATA drive.
Now the system reboots and displays "Error Loading Operating System" after the POST.
Pressing F12 and selecting to boot from the IDE drive does nothing (or trying to boot to the SATA yields the same error). I've even used the Mandrake CD to try and reinstall the boot partition.
In the BIOS I can only select the IDE or the CD-ROM as boot devices. It seems like when I mix the two drives, the system doesn't know where to find the boot loader (GRUB). What's the work around?
I would like to have multiple drives (both IDE and SATA) in the machine at the same time.
Removing either drive and installing Mandrake on either drive works fine, so I know there isn't a problem with the drives themselves.
Is this a BIOS issue, Mandrake issue? I don't know.
This is a re-post from the Hard Drive Forum on shesagordie's suggestion.
tombo14
10 Posts
0
March 1st, 2004 07:00
check BIOS and MB manual to see any conflict / workaround when using
both SATA and IDE.
But... on second thought, since you are redirected from hardware guys,
you must have gone through all that. ;-)
Just a suggestion for my part:
Since you have installed Linux on IDE, I'll assume grub lives on
IDE drive.
How about installing another grub on SATA, and chainloading IDE's grub?
That way, if your BIOS happens to see SATA only, its grub will load
IDE's grub.
I worked with grub chaining on a single drive, but not with multiple
drives. So it might not work as expected.
Good luck.