[plug] grub query in mixed sata / pata setup

[Denis Brown]

Hello PLUG list members,

Not totally sure if this is sata / pata related but here goes...

ASUS P5K mobo with sata controller within the Intel P35 chipset 
(Northbridge, from what I can infer) and a JMicron JMB363 device providing 
pata and other services.   Disk setup is three 300GB sata which will be 
software RAID5'ed to provide the data store and an 80GB pata drive intended 
for system use.   Also pata CD/DVD-RW.

The CD is connected as master, the 80GB drive as slave (I think it odd, but 
if I change that to HDD master and CD slave it will not see or boot from 
the CD.)

Ubuntu (7.0.4 for 64-bit) installs on the 80GB drive and determines that it 
is /dev/sdd    The three to-be-RAIDed's are /dev/sda, sdb and 
sdc.    Attempt to boot from the HDD yields error 17 "Cannot mount selected 
partition" from GRUB.

But... I activated the boot choice menu screen for Grub and it appears - 
ergo the path /boot/grub *is* being found.   Further, if I drop into Grub's 
shell (the "c" key from the boot choice menu) I can do a cat 
/boot/grub/menu.lst for example and find the contents as I expect them.   I 
can also successfully see the contents of fstab with a cat /etc/fstab

So, what's its problem about not being able to mount the partition????

May not be related... initially I was getting Grub error 5 and eliminated 
this by fdisk'ing the three data drives to create a partition on 
each.    Hmmm... maybe I should format them to something (ext3 for example) 
just in case Grub is trying to mount one of them.   But why would 
it?   Nothing in the Ubuntu installation talked about setting up the data 
drives.

Hitting with clue-bat appreciated :-)
Denis