Some progress :-) was.. Re: [plug] grub query in mixed sata / pata setup

[Denis Brown]

Many thanks to those who replied on this.   The collective replies made me 
wonder what would happen if I reduced the system to a "plain vanilla" one, 
temporarily removing the three stata drives from the equation.

The result is that I now have Ubuntu 7.0.4 installed and booting from hard 
disk which reported SCSI9(0,1,0) by gparted.

Now to add back the sata drives but not connected to sata channels 0, 1 and 
2 which they were roiginally, but rather as channels 1, 2 and 3.   My hope 
is that the BIOS regards sata channel 0 as being the JMicron device in the 
absence of a physical stata drive at channel 0.

We shall see :-)
Denis