[plug] Need help with SATA and MBR

[chris.griffin at swiftdsl.com.au]

Thanks Craig, I shall give that all a go tonight.
I did use lilo, old habits.

Thanks again.

Chris G

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Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 10:38:42 +0800


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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