HELP with GRUB and SATA drives

[miazmaticdotcom]

Hey all,

I had a server (specs in sig, "Dumpster") running happily on Debian with GRUB.

Yesterday I bought a Silicon Image 3114 chipset PCI SATA card and compiled a new kernel with the driver. I also bought two Maxtor 250GB SATA drives.

I installed the drives and rebooted. The computer froze at "GRUB loading, please wait..." after stage1.5. As soon as I removed the SATA drives, it came up just fine. I tried LILO, which said "Duplicated Volume ID" and refused to boot.

I have tried a lot of things (grub-install --recheck, lilo -z -M, etc) to try and get these bootloaders to boot with my new drives connected. Remember that I'm not trying to boot FROM the SATA drives, but rather from the 40GB IDE Seagate that was already there.

Lots of other people seem to have SATA and Linux working together quite well, so someone please help...

P.S. The BIOS on this motherboard is weird, it only reads the first 8GB of every disk. So the 40GB drive has a seperate /boot partition. Maybe this is unique to my situation?

 

[upriverpaddler]

Update your BIOS and try installing Ubuntu. It has a GRUB bootloader and works fine on the very last partition on my SATA drives (I). If that works, then it may be your homebrew thats at fault.

 

[miazmaticdotcom]

Turns out it was the BIOS on the SATA card. Updated that and it magically worked.