Hi. On my old Gateway 500 P111 (Katmai) with 256MB RAM, I have 2 harddrives (hda and hdb) on the first IDE controller. There is a CDROM drive, and a CDwriter on the second IDE controller. On the IDE PCI adaptor card there is 1 harddrive on the 1st IDE controller, and my DVDROM drive on the 2nd IDE controller.
The distro's on these drives. (this started in 2003)
Win ME is on hda, and this is the drive with the active partition. Then I added a second harddrive, because I wanted to try out Linux, and put MDK 9.2 on it. (hdb). MDK 9.2's LiLo bootloader went into the MBR on hda, and apart from MDK 9.2 frying my LG CDROM drive on install, LiLo worked ok, and gave me the options for Win ME or MDK 9.2.
Next I came by FC1, on a Linux Format magazine cover, and went for installing that along with MDK 9.2. I won't go into the details, but both distro's for some reason wanted exclusive use of the swap partition, and is why I ended up installing FC1 on the harddrive on the IDE adaptor card. (details omitted here also). I could not get an entry for FC1 in LiLo on the MBR of hda to boot FC1, so created a boot floppy for FC1, which is the way that FC1 on the IDE adaptor card (hde) boots as of today.
Some time later I replaced MDK 9.2 with FC2, and replaced MDK 9.2's LiLo bootloader with FC2's Grub in the MBR of hda. I tried adding an entry to boot a kernel for FC1 in the now GRub bootloader in the MBR of hda, but FC1 still would not boot from Grub in the MBR.
Not knowing about grub-install at the time, I reinstalled FC1, I know, you shouldn't have to do this. Anyway I reinstalled it, and put Grub in hde1 the / partiton for FC1. Still no success with now making a chainloader link from Grub in the MBR of hda to Grub in the / partition of hde. So back to the floppy boot for FC1.
I also had, some time later some strange results, when trying to put the Grub bootloader for FC1 on the PCI adaptor card into the MBR of hda. The screen for Grub that displayed on bootup was very hashed up, and I could just about see the entries for the different distro's, and nothing would boot, but it was a bit hit and miss trying to select the entries. So I reinstalled FC2's Grub in the MBR.
Today I have Win ME (hardly used) on hda, FC2 on hdb, with it's GRub bootloader in the MBR of hda. FC1 on hde (the IDE PCI adaptor card) but only booting from floppy. I also have FC3 on another partition of hda, with it's Grub bootloader in it's / partition. And also FC5 on another partition of hda, with it's Grub bootloader in it's / partition.
There is no problem booting up anything on drives hda and hdb that are on the mobo's IDE controllers. The last time I put an entry into Grub on the MBR to try and chainload to Grub in hde, it came back on bootup as "No Disk Found".
It's strange that I can boot up FC1 from a floppy disk, but can't chainload to the Grub bootloader for it.
/sbin/lspci shows this entry for the card.
00:10.0 Mass storage controller: Silicon Image, Inc. PCI0680 Ultra ATA-133 Host Controller (rev 02)
Details of the card at:
http://www.mri.co.uk . And the card is a MRI-PCI/A133
Incidentally. I have no problem accessing this drive from any Linux distro once booted up. I originally set up the disks partitions using a Win ME boot disk's fdisk tool, so all the partitions were fat32, and I regularly save data from the other distro's to the spare partitions on hde.
On bootup, POST is done for the MOBO's BIOS, then the setup for the IDE PCI adaptor card is shown, with the harddrive shown as first on the first IDE controller (hde) , and the DVDROM drive showing as first on the Second IDE controller (hdg).
Any help or suggestions would be very gratefully received. Nigel. aka mekon.
ps:
I don't really want to trash FC1. Sometimes questions are asked by folks using it, and it is usefull still having it available. I know it's in maintenance mode at Fedora Legacy, but it still works well as an OS. if there is no solution to the IDE adaptor card problem, I suppose I could move FC1 to one of the drives using the MOBO's IDE controllers, and just use hde as a data storage drive.
Linear Mode
