Linux Format forums

Re: lilo with PATA and SATA drives

wyliecoyoteuk — Tue Oct 18, 2005 9:17 pm

Author: wyliecoyoteuk

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2005 9:17 pm

Update:
Have now installed suse 10/64, and no matter what I do, it will not boot with the second PATA drive installed.
Tried all the settings that I can, Lilo, Grub, (even the new option in YAST to change the drive order)....Nowt.
With just the 1 PATA and 1 SATA, it works fine...grrr

Re: lilo with PATA and SATA drives

wyliecoyoteuk — Tue Sep 27, 2005 9:33 pm

Author: wyliecoyoteuk

Posted: Tue Sep 27, 2005 9:33 pm

Well, back from France, great holiday, can't wait for the Dieppe Kite festival same time next year.
I managed to solve it, but....
I installed a 120GB drive in the removable drive bay, booted from the suse9.3 DVD, selected "install", when the installer asked me if I wanted to boot the installed system it had detected, said yes.
Then logged in ran Yast, updated lilo, and for good measure ran the system>partitioner, and mounted the various partitions (my old main disk) to /oldwindows,/oldroot,oldusr, etc.
rebooted, and now it works!
Just annoying that the controller still enumerates the disks in it's own fashion , despite delving into the Gigabyte advanced bios settings (Ctrl-F1 at bios menu) and why SMART support should be in there, I don't know, nothing much else is.
Seems like if I change my IDE drives, I'll have to go through this again, buit not the fault of the OS. :O

Re: lilo with PATA and SATA drives

Nigel — Fri Sep 16, 2005 12:31 pm

Author: Nigel

Posted: Fri Sep 16, 2005 12:31 pm

It's been a while since I used lilo, but the grub line for SuSE looks something like this :

Code:

title SUSE LINUX 9.2
kernel (hd0,0)/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda3 vga=0x31a selinux=0 splash=silent resume=/dev/hda2 desktop elevator=as showopts
initrd (hd0,0)/initrd

What I think is happening is that when you add a second PATA drive, the controller is renumbering it's disks. Your first PATA drive will be (hd0,0). Without the second PATA drive in place, your SATA drive is picked up as (hd1,0). However, when you add the second PATA drive, it becomes (hd1,0) and the SATA drive becomes (hd2,0)
The second partition on the SATA drive (sda2) will be (hd1,1) originally and (hd2,1) after the second PATA drive is added.

What you ideally need to do is to force the controller to enumerate the drives in the order you want, rather than just in the order it finds them. You might get lucky browsing through your BIOS settings (I think I have seen this ability on a machine somewhere).
A more likely solution may be to get yourself a PCI IDE controller and put your second drive on that... hopefully all the drives on the first controller will be enumerated before the ones on the second controller.

Re: lilo with PATA and SATA drives

wyliecoyoteuk — Fri Sep 16, 2005 11:13 am

Author: wyliecoyoteuk

Posted: Fri Sep 16, 2005 11:13 am

The root partition is on the SATA drive is sda2 (sda1 is swap), and the PC is booting into lilo on PATA drive hda1 (windows partition) so it shouldn`t alter the drive configuration on the PATA drives, just by adding one.

I want to use the second PATA drive slot for a removable drive tray, so that I can swap drives, for backing up, and for distro testing, as I have several hard drives of varying size.

Looks like I'll have to leave a drive in there whenever I want to boot, I suppose , but Imay need to reinstall suse, as I can`t boot with one in there at the moment, and I can`t connect one after booting
Although I might be able to boot from the DVD and change the lilo config from there
I am off to France for a couple of weeks tonight, so it'll have to wait until I get back.
Thanks for the input.

Re: lilo with PATA and SATA drives

Nigel — Wed Sep 14, 2005 9:56 pm

Author: Nigel

Posted: Wed Sep 14, 2005 9:56 pm

Ah... try incrementing the drive number for SuSE in the boot by one. So if it currently looks for the kernel at (hd1,0) try changing that to (hd2,0).

Re: lilo with PATA and SATA drives

wyliecoyoteuk — Wed Sep 14, 2005 8:21 pm

Author: wyliecoyoteuk

Posted: Wed Sep 14, 2005 8:21 pm

main ide drive is hda, DVDRW is hdb, secondary ide is hdc, dvd drive is hdd, SATA drive is sda.

I think it is probably the controller is a hybrid pata/sata contoroller, and has it`s own numbering system.....

RE: lilo with PATA and SATA drives

linuxgirlie — Tue Sep 13, 2005 2:11 pm

Author: linuxgirlie

Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2005 2:11 pm

Nigel is right I get this message with mandrake if I move a hard drive from master to slave or change the ide cable from ide to ide 2 or vice versa....

RE: lilo with PATA and SATA drives

Nigel — Tue Sep 13, 2005 12:48 pm

Author: Nigel

Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2005 12:48 pm

I think that by adding your second PATA drive you may have changed the drive order...
it sounds like lilo is looking at hdb for SuSE - you may need to change that to hdc instead ?

lilo with PATA and SATA drives

wyliecoyoteuk — Mon Sep 12, 2005 11:01 pm

Author: wyliecoyoteuk

Posted: Mon Sep 12, 2005 11:01 pm

Anyone know how to get lilo working with multiple PATA SATA drives?

Setup:
Gigabyte skt 939 mobo with athlon 64
windows on PATA drive, Suse9.3 64 bit on SATA drive, 2 ide DVD drives all works fine, until I add a second PATA drive, then lilo gives L 99 99
99 99...........

I know that this a drive geomtry error, so I assume that lilo is trying to boot from the second PATA drive, but how can I tell it to boot from the SATA?

I can boot from the Suse install DVD, and then boot the Suse system,
everything works fine.
This is annoying, as I wanted to use the second PATA drive as a shared
space between windows and linux.
Also, what might happen if I add a second SATA drive?