Bug 104581 - grub and lilo fail to install on sata drives
Summary: grub and lilo fail to install on sata drives
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: SUSE LINUX 10.0
Classification: openSUSE
Component: Installation (show other bugs)
Version: Beta 1
Hardware: x86 SUSE Other
: P5 - None : Normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Jiri Srain
QA Contact: Klaus Kämpf
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2005-08-14 00:42 UTC by Bob Ramsey
Modified: 2005-08-22 07:12 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:
Found By: Beta-Customer
Services Priority:
Business Priority:
Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: ---
IT Deployment: ---


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Description Bob Ramsey 2005-08-14 00:42:22 UTC
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!
Comment 1 Jiri Srain 2005-08-15 11:24:49 UTC
1. Sometimes it is not possible. Please attach hwinfo output (hwinfo --all  
--log <filename> and YaST logs (/var/log/YaST2/*) to let me examine what  
happened during installation  
  
2. Already fixed  
  
3. Which Browse button do you mean? There is only a combo box in the dialog 
where you select where to install GRUB 
 
4. There is unfortunatelly nothing to improve if YaST doesn't get correct 
information about disks order. 
Comment 2 Bob Ramsey 2005-08-15 15:19:27 UTC
1)  Since I don't have a working partition, how can I get those?

2)  Cool!  Thanks.  BTW, I've been a long time Mandriva user, but I'm seriously
considering SUSE with the next version.  Fast responses like this are a reason why.

3)  Let me get back to you on this one.

4)  Makes sense.
Comment 3 Jiri Srain 2005-08-15 15:27:53 UTC
1. Boot installation CD, when YaST comes up, switch to 2nd console, you get a 
shell. There you can mount the root partition of your system to get YaST logs 
and/or run hwinfo. Copy the files (tared YaST logs and hwinfo log) somewhere 
(if you do network installation, you can use SCP, otherwise a FAT partition, 
floppy, whatever you have), and then attach them. 
 
I expect that BIOS either didn't provide any information, or the provided 
information was incorrect. 
 
3. You may mean Browse button in the dialog for booting other partition. It 
really didn't work in Beta1, but it has already been fixed. 
Comment 4 Bob Ramsey 2005-08-21 13:06:58 UTC
I just downloaded and installed Beta 2 and had *no* problems at all.  Everything
worked perfectly!

Thanks for the quick attention to the bug report and the quick fix!

As far as I'm concerned, this bug can be closed.  If you still want me to upload
a  hwinfo log, or anything else, let me know.

Bob
Comment 5 Jiri Srain 2005-08-22 07:12:04 UTC
If you are satisfied with current status, I don't need the logs. Thanks for 
texting!