[plug] Need help with SATA and MBR

[Craig Ringer]

> I installed Win XP onto it fine. I then started to install RedHat 9 (opps,
> delete the work RedHat).
> RedHat (old habits die hard) did not install LILO onto the MBA of the SATA
> drive (probably my fault, I probably missed the bit on telling it where to
> put the boot record)

It'll install the boot-loader to the MBR by default - you would've had 
to tell it to do otherwise. Perhaps the primary HDD was different when 
you did the install due to changing the BIOS boot order?

> I did create a boot floppy. When I rebooted and
> found that I did not get LILO, I realised what had happened and booted the
> floppy. 

Are you definitely using LILO? Red Hat defaults to GRUB, and IMHO GRUB 
is a much better choice for non-stone-age hardware.

> I got in edited /etc/lilo.conf, and changed the boot location from
> hda to the SATA drive. When I then ran lilo it told me the disk was too
> big and I should try using lba32 instead of linear. OK, so I changed that
> in lilo.conf and this time it worked, except for the warning message
> saying that I was not using the first physical disk.

Yup - you'll be in for disk remapping horrors I suspect. Try GRUB 
instead, it's often better at this sort of arrangement.

> Now when I go to boot I get "LI" and that's it. I cannot even get to boot
> Windblows. Is there something I am missing, how can I restore the original
> mbr? 

To restore the Windows MBR, boot your windows CD and:
(win95/98): fdisk /mbr
(win2k/XP): fixmbr

 > I cannot really boot DOS and do fdisk /mbr (it would only re-install
> the mbr on the first disk hda, or can I)?

It'll install the MBR wherever it needs to be - the first disk according 
to the BIOS.

> Also, during install, the only options for the video were for Raneon 9500
> or 9700. What must I do to get it to work on the 9600 Pro?
> Thanks in advance folks.

Probably just use the normal radeon driver and it'll work fine. If 
there's a radeon (generic) use that. It's possible that an XFree86 
upgrade may be needed to get the newer radeons going, however. I just 
"apt-get install XFree86" to get the latest 4.3 build from 
fedora-core-test2 .

I'd suggest (a) making sure your BIOS boot order is correct, then (b) 
installing GRUB and seeing how you go with that. The easy way may be to 
just reinstall RH9, but if you want you could try booting the RH9 rescue 
CD and doing a 'grub-install /dev/hdx' (insert appropriate disk device, 
of course). You may need to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and/or specify 
additional options to grub-install if you've got a weird boot setup, as 
it sounds like you do.

Craig Ringer


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