StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Remember this thread? Well the second drive just died, and now whenever I start up the computer, Grub throws up an error. I figured I'd just use a boot floppy to boot into windows, and run fixmbr. The only problem is that none of the boot disks I can find have SATA drivers.

Do even I need them? I haven't tried using the boot floppy, because my floppy drive isn't installed, and I don't feel like shuting down the computer, because the LiveCD I'm using takes a long time to start up.

Does the XP install CD have SATA drivers? I can't remember. You can boot that and use the recovery console to log into your windows partition and do fixmbr/fixboot.

Resinence wrote:Does the XP install CD have SATA drivers? I can't remember. You can boot that and use the recovery console to log into your windows partition and do fixmbr/fixboot.

It doesn't, you have to provide them on a floppy, and it asks you for them after you go past the choice for the recovery console.

Can't you manually tell GRUB which hard drives are which, so even w/ the 2nd drive gone it should still work w/ the renumbered drives? Type e w/ the boot entry you want to edit...

Pu-239 wrote:Can't you manually tell GRUB which hard drives are which, so even w/ the 2nd drive gone it should still work w/ the renumbered drives? Type e w/ the boot entry you want to edit...

Grub is gone. The hard drive it was installed on died.

(Why the fuck would a boot loader install itself on an HDD anyway? Piece of shit...)

Dominus Atheos wrote:Grub is gone. The hard drive it was installed on died.

(Why the fuck would a boot loader install itself on an HDD anyway? Piece of shit...)

And your computer is supposed to boot from where?

phongn wrote:

Dominus Atheos wrote:Grub is gone. The hard drive it was installed on died.

(Why the fuck would a boot loader install itself on an HDD anyway? Piece of shit...)

And your computer is supposed to boot from where?

The MBR of any HDD with an operating system. GRUB overwrote the MBR of Hard Drive 1, and installed itself on HDD2. Now that HDD2 died, it broke the MBR of HDD1. I feel perfectly justified in calling it a piece of shit.

Dominus Atheos wrote:The MBR of any HDD with an operating system. GRUB overwrote the MBR of Hard Drive 1, and installed itself on HDD2. Now that HDD2 died, it broke the MBR of HDD1. I feel perfectly justified in calling it a piece of shit.

And whose fault is that for not paying attention to configuration details? Bootloaders install themselves into the MBR of the first drive and dump the rest of the stuff in any number of places (depending on the loader).

phongn wrote:

Dominus Atheos wrote:The MBR of any HDD with an operating system. GRUB overwrote the MBR of Hard Drive 1, and installed itself on HDD2. Now that HDD2 died, it broke the MBR of HDD1. I feel perfectly justified in calling it a piece of shit.

And whose fault is that for not paying attention to configuration details?

What configuration details? All Ubuntu's installer had me do was fill out some fields about what I wanted to name my user account.

Bootloaders install themselves into the MBR of the first drive and dump the rest of the stuff in any number of places (depending on the loader).

Yeah, and that's a stupid thing to do. It should install itself into the MBR of the drive I installed the operating system onto.

Dominus Atheos wrote:Yeah, and that's a stupid thing to do. It should install itself into the MBR of the drive I installed the operating system onto.

Lets say you have two hard drives in a PC. The first drive - Drive (1) - has Windows installed and you are planning to install Linux to the second. If the Linux boot loader, in your case GRUB, is only installed to the second hard drive - Drive (2) - then when the machine boots the motherboard will attempt to boot from Drive (1), with Drive (2) and GRUB never touched. You'll generally never then be able to boot into your Linux install.

A proviso to this is that you can, with some motherboard BIOSs, tell the system which drive to boot from during POST.

To get GRUB to only install to your Linux (or whatever OS) drive, one of the simplest ways is to remove all other hard drives - just disconnect their STA or IDE cable, then install the OS, then re-connect the drives.

Just because YOU find something to be stupid doesn't mean it actually is or hasn't been done for a good reason.

Dominus Atheos wrote:Yeah, and that's a stupid thing to do. It should install itself into the MBR of the drive I installed the operating system onto.

Which is all of 512 bytes. It needs to store the kernel (several megabytes) - not going to happen.

Many setups install GRUB on its own partition. If you did not allow the creation of a Logical partition or an LVM, it will be forced to stick itself on a second drive if that is Ubuntu's default.

Alternatively, if what you did was just install Ubuntu entirely on the second disk, leaving your first disk entirely as your windows disk, just boot into the recovery console and run fixmbr.

Resinence wrote:Does the XP install CD have SATA drivers? I can't remember. You can boot that and use the recovery console to log into your windows partition and do fixmbr/fixboot.

Err, missed this. I know the SP2 CDs do, if he has an SP1/original CD it might not.

Fortunately, license keys are compatible as long as you don't try to mix home/professional/etc or OEM/retail.

Dominus Atheos wrote:

phongn wrote:

Dominus Atheos wrote:The MBR of any HDD with an operating system. GRUB overwrote the MBR of Hard Drive 1, and installed itself on HDD2. Now that HDD2 died, it broke the MBR of HDD1. I feel perfectly justified in calling it a piece of shit.

And whose fault is that for not paying attention to configuration details?

What configuration details? All Ubuntu's installer had me do was fill out some fields about what I wanted to name my user account.

Bootloaders install themselves into the MBR of the first drive and dump the rest of the stuff in any number of places (depending on the loader).

Yeah, and that's a stupid thing to do. It should install itself into the MBR of the drive I installed the operating system onto.

I believe LILO installs itself entirely into the MBR. Of course, LILO sucks, because you can only shove so much in 512 bytes....

Dominus Atheos wrote:

phongn wrote:

Dominus Atheos wrote:The MBR of any HDD with an operating system. GRUB overwrote the MBR of Hard Drive 1, and installed itself on HDD2. Now that HDD2 died, it broke the MBR of HDD1. I feel perfectly justified in calling it a piece of shit.

And whose fault is that for not paying attention to configuration details?

What configuration details? All Ubuntu's installer had me do was fill out some fields about what I wanted to name my user account.

Well, in general, Linux has a small seperate boot partition to hold grub's dependencies, usually 50-100 megs (depends on how clean you keep it). You could have stuck this on the 1st HDD - of course, not really obvious (never really had to deal w/ this, since all OSes go on one disk, and the rest goes on the same disk or another hard drive sitting on a fileserver). Most OSes aren't really designed to handle hardware failure all that well .

Anyway, what's so hard about booting the XP CD w/ drivers off a floppy (ugh, you would think Microsoft would have provided updated install media during XP's 6 year lifetime w/ driver support, or at least ability to use flash drive during install) and select recovery console?

Also, in addition, I think you can tell GRUB to write itself to a single partition instead of the MBR, then set the partition as active.

Pu-239 wrote:Anyway, what's so hard about booting the XP CD w/ drivers off a floppy (ugh, you would think Microsoft would have provided updated install media during XP's 6 year lifetime w/ driver support, or at least ability to use flash drive during install) and select recovery console?

My Windows disk doesn't ask for drivers until after I get past the option to start the recovery console. Can I go back after that?

Dominus Atheos wrote:

Pu-239 wrote:Anyway, what's so hard about booting the XP CD w/ drivers off a floppy (ugh, you would think Microsoft would have provided updated install media during XP's 6 year lifetime w/ driver support, or at least ability to use flash drive during install) and select recovery console?

My Windows disk doesn't ask for drivers until after I get past the option to start the recovery console. Can I go back after that?

Never mind, there's an option after it asks, too.

Problem solved, thank you.

So the XP Install Disk Doesn't have SATA Drivers? Well then that automatically makes it all pointless on modern SATA rigs

MKSheppard wrote:So the XP Install Disk Doesn't have SATA Drivers? Well then that automatically makes it all pointless on modern SATA rigs

If you have a floppy drive you can have the driver on a disk. You can also slipstream your own CD with needed drivers.

MKSheppard wrote:So the XP Install Disk Doesn't have SATA Drivers? Well then that automatically makes it all pointless on modern SATA rigs

XP was released fully two years before the SATA standard was written. Don't blame MS on this one.

Well, they could have at least stuck it on the newer versions such as the WinXP discs w/ SP2

Pu-239 wrote:Well, they could have at least stuck it on the newer versions such as the WinXP discs w/ SP2

They must have, since I have no problem installing or getting to the recovery console with any of my SP2 discs on SATA-only computers.

A lot of motherboards have IDE emulation in the BIOS. However you lose features like NCQ if you go this route, and you can't just flip the switch back after installation for Windows . Installing Windows on my P5B Deluxe was an exercise in frustration since I didn't have a floppy drive, and couldn't figure out how to slipstream drivers in properly w/o generating a ton of coasters.

(Unlike Linux which is fairly tolerant of massive hardware changes (at the cost of longer boot times )- it'll generally at least boot to a command prompt, from which appropriate drivers can be installed, unless the target hardware is bleeding edge).

EDIT: That version of XP w/ SP2 on it did come off of MSDN though.

Pu-239 wrote:Well, they could have at least stuck it on the newer versions such as the WinXP discs w/ SP2

YES, which is what I have