Hello,

To put in a nuthsell, i recently bought a S-ATA rack and a S-ATA drive
WD Caviar SE Serial ATA 8Mo 250GB for storage purpose.
First of all,  let me precise that  this new drive has already been
formatted and is fully functionnal, secondly, i do not practice any kind
of  RAID.
I am running a dual boot configuration which holds Debian (Sarge) and
WiN XP.

When plugging the rack and booting, GRUB doesnt launch itself correctly,
it hangs at "GRUB_"
The most weird in this case is that when i unplugged the rack,  GRUB
works correctly and loads any OS successfully.

Here are some more details:

My first S-ATA HDD (WD Raptor 8Mo 74 GB) is dedicated to WiN XP and
GRUB is situated in its MBR whereas Unbutu is installed on a
dedicated partition locatedin my primary slave  HDD. My Raptor S-ATA
disk and my S-ATA rack are respectively known as  "Disk 0"  and "Disk 1"
under the bios (its what the siluro controller displays before launching
the booting process).

Given the fact that before installing Linux, my PC booted perfeclty
with the S-ATA rack plugged, i start thinking that my GRUB config files
(or GRUB itself) seem likely to be the origin of the problem  and that
the bios may not be pointed out.

When the rack is plugged, it appears that all is like GRUB was looking
to start from the MBR of my  second S-ATA HDD (the rack one) without any
logical reason.  Its really the impression i get, GRUB seems not to
recognize the boot partition and for any reason it tries to start on
the second SATA HDD.

I guess that GRUB is making a kind of confusion and switches the two
drives.

At the present time, i dont even know how does the bios consider my
HDDs, IDE first and S-ATA in second or could it be the opposite ?
I am supposing that from a bios point of view, the actual order of my
HHDs is the following :

(This is the hard drives order that a diagnostic tool, running on a
bootable floppy,
for maxtor HDDs gives me)
1)  WD Raptor                              (S-ATA) as primary master
2)  WD Caviar SE Serial ATA       (S-ATA) as secondary master
3)  Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9     (IDE)  as primary master
4)  Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10   (IDE)  as primary slave

But it could also be :

(basically, it's the way the bios displays the recognized drives, the
ATA ones then the S-ATA ones)
1)  Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9     (IDE)  as primary master
2)  Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10   (IDE)  as primary slave
3)  WD Raptor                              (S-ATA) as primary master
4)  WD Caviar SE Serial ATA       (S-ATA) as secondary master


Back to GRUB, i have re-checked my config files (menu.lst and device.map).
On the one hand i would say that all is ok because when the rack is
unplugged, the system boots and GRUB works. On the other hand, as GRUB
doesnt work when the rack is plugged,  i guess i should modify my
device.map file or  use the command map in my menu.lst file but  here is
a real dilemna.

Whatever is the HDDs order recognition in the bios (evocated above), i
am lead to suppose that the S-ATA HDDs number are consecutive whereas i
get this in my device.map file :

(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/sda ---> S-ATA (S-ATA HDD are said to be recognized as SCSI
device)
(hd1) /dev/hda
(hd2) /dev/hdb
(hd3) /dev/sdb ---->S-ATA

which is rather problematic !

The question is who do i have to trust.

Supposing the bios is right, do i have to arrange the mapping like :

(fd0) /dev/fd0   or like  (fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/sda              (hd0) /dev/hda
(hd1) /dev/sdb              (hd1) /dev/hdb
(hd2) /dev/hda              (hd2) /dev/sda                    (hd3)
/dev/hdb              (hd3) /dev/sdb
and modify the menu.lst file consequently ?

Or should i leave this file and put the following lines in menu.lst under
the Windows loader section :
map (hd0) (hd3)
map (hd3) (hd0)
?

It's really what i can't figure out, i have been searching a solution
for now 3 weeks and i feel like giving up.
I may precise that my bios boot device entries are respectively :
1 - floppy
2 - SCSI  (i also have a Serial ATA entry and selecting it works also)
3 - Cd-Rom


PS1 : My motherboard is an Abit NF7-S (v2.x /1.0) (according to
SisoftSandra) and its bios has been flashed 5 months ago.

PS2 : My onboard sata controller ref is :  "Siluro 3112  Sata Raid
Controller"

PS3:  Last week i was looking for an Abit bios that could let me choose
specifically  the right boot device among my two S-ATA drives but as
their detection happens later in the booting process, i guess it's useless.

PS4 : Using a LiveCD, rack plugged,  i run the command "fdisk -l" and i
obtain that :

Disk /dev/hda: 203.9 Go, 203928109056 octets --------> First ATA disk
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24792 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 octets

Boot device       Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        4863    39062016    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            4864       24792   160079692+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5            4864       12158    58597056    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda6           12159       18237    48829536    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda7           18238       24792    52653006    7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/hdb: 203.9 Go, 203928109056 octets -----------> Second ATA disk
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24792 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 octets

Boot device        Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1   *           1        7295    58597056    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hdb2            7296       24792   140544652+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hdb5            7296       13374    48829536    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/hdb6           13375       22361    72188046    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/hdb7           22362       23125     6136798+  83  Linux
/dev/hdb8           23126       23255     1044193+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hdb9           23256       24792    12345921   83  Linux

Disk /dev/hde: 74.3 Go, 74355769344 octets ----------------> First Sata Disk
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9039 cylinders                  (containing
WiN XP & GRUB)
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 octets

Boot device            Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hde1   *           1        9038    72597703+   7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/hdg: 250.0 Go, 250059350016 octets ---------------> Second
S-ATA disk
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 octets

Boot device         Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdg1               2       30401   244188000    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hdg5               2       15202   122102001    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hdg6           15203       30401   122085936    7  HPFS/NTFS

My last question was about this order ( 1-  Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 2 -
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10  3 - WD Raptor   4 - WD Caviar SE
Serial ATA) and the order given in device.map, they currenlty  don't
match each other, is there something i miss ?

I recently tried to recover the windows bootloader but using the fixmbr
command with a xp cd or restoring the default bootloader through a
rescue mode didnt change anything, GRUB is still here and works
properly...(no rack plugged)

I thank you in advance for any answer or advise you might bring.


E.S

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