Bug 104581

I have an AMD64 system from Monarch Computers.  It's an Asus KX-9 motherboard
with 1 gig of ram, 2 180 gig sata drives, sda and sdb, 2 ide drives, and 2 dvd
recorders.  sda should be the boot drive, sda1 is a windows partition and sda2
is the / partition.  The bios is set up to put sda as the first hard drive in
the boot order

During installation, both grub and lilo failed to install properly by taking the
defaults.  The defaults tried to put grub and lilo on the ide drives.

I went through the installation again, and forced grub onto the mbr of sda.  The
installation "succeeded" except that when I rebooted, the mbr was corrupt.  I
repeated the install forcing grub onto sda1, with not luck.

I then repeated with lilo on sda and sda1.  In all cases, upon reboot the mbr
was corrupted and I couldn't boot.

I tried using yast to change the priority order of the drives but that either
wasn't completely implemented in the beta or doesn't do what I thought it did. 
I got various results after re-ordering the drives.  Sometimes after re-ordering
the drives they wouldn't appear in the drop down box to select a drive.  Hitting
the browse button did nothing.

I unplugged the ide cable for the two ide hard drives, leaving only the sda and
sdb sata drives and the hda and hdb dvd rom drives.

Yast successfully detected that it should install grub and lilo on sda, but when
I rebooted the mbr was corrupted.  I tried this with both grub and lilo as the
bootloader.

I finally "fixed" the problem by inserting my windows xp cd and going into the
recovery console and running fixmbr and fixboot.  The downside to this fix is
that I am only running windows now.

Suggested solutions:

1)  Read Bios information to discover the boot order of the hard drives. 
Default grub or lilo to the hard drive that the bios considers to be the first
boot hard drive.  (This also affects what yast suggests as the mount points for
windows partitions.  It thought c: should have been f: and f: should have been
c: because it put the ide drives ahead of the sata drives.  But that's a
different bug.)

2)  When the user re-orders the drives within yast, default grub to the mbr of
the first drive in the list.

3)  When the user hits the browse button to browse for the drive to install grub
onto, it should work.

4)  Improve handling of bootloader installation on systems that mix sata/ide drives.

I hope that was enough information about what I tried and what happened.

Thanks!