asked on

Grub setup with 2 hd (change boot disk)

I recently installed Fedora 9, as I thought Ubuntu didn't quite meet my expectations. - Bad choice, I guess, but that's another story...

My laptop (Dell XPS m1730) has two disks and my Linux system is installed on the second one. During installation I got the option to choose what disk the system was to boot from. I answered disk A. Then I got the question if I really would like it like that as the system was on disk B. - Well "boot from" is rather vague I guess so I changed it.

Now, fortunately my BIOS lets me boot from disk B, but of course I would prefer not having to pick up the boot list each time I start up. I kind of thought that the problem would be simply solved by running something like grub-install /dev/sda... Here's where the real issue started. Now I had the screen full of "GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB..." - looks quite like my first Basic program in the late 70's. Booting from disk B was corrupted as well.

For some reason my device.map file says hd0 is sdb and hd1 is sda. This can not be changed without complications either.

So, how do I tell grub to boot from disk A instead (and work, I might add)?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

arndawg

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

obg

ASKER

This does not help me very much. I have a Windoze boot partition as well, on the first disk. Why do I need to give the root command to grub? How are the parameters interpreted? Why can't it use sda and sdb wich are the names of my disk devices? I assume that hd0 (for example) gets parsed through device.map...? And setup (hd0) would again install on MBR of sdb, right? Can I change the device.map and set hd0 to sda and hd1 to sdb and then update grub.conf without problems?

obg

ASKER

Well, I finally got it working with grub-install. I don't know why but I changed everything I thought should be changed and now it works...

I'll give you some cred anyway...