I have a problem booting my installed system from the hard disk
The system boots fine from the installation DVD (Suse 9.2), the
bootloader (grub) seems to install okay, but grub cannot actually
load the kernel from the hard disk. I have tried many variations
of grub and lilo installed on the hard disk and floppies, but
none can successfully load the kernel from the SATA hard disk.
Note: the kernel is too big to fit on a floppy.
I managed to create a custom bootable CD with the desired kernel
and initrd on it -- this works fine.

Anyone experienced such a problem and/or any ideas how to fix it
so it can boot from straight from the hard disk?

The system:
AMD Athlon64 939 3800+
Asus A8N-SLI motherboard
4GB RAM
3x Maxtor DiamondMAx 300GB SATA hard disks

I managed to install WindowsXP Professional, and it can boot okay.

Thanks,
Leigh

leigh wrote:

> I have a problem booting my installed system from the hard disk
> The system boots fine from the installation DVD (Suse 9.2), the
> bootloader (grub) seems to install okay, but grub cannot actually
> load the kernel from the hard disk. I have tried many variations
> of grub and lilo installed on the hard disk and floppies, but
> none can successfully load the kernel from the SATA hard disk.
> Note: the kernel is too big to fit on a floppy.
> I managed to create a custom bootable CD with the desired kernel
> and initrd on it -- this works fine.

I think you'd have to say how exactly your system fails to boot.
What is the last message you get?

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

Upon further investigation, I discovered the problem is with ordering
of the
SATA disks. The disks are connected to connectors SATA1, SATA2, SATA3
on the motherboard, and they are seen as such by grub at bootup:
SATA1 = (hd0), SATA2 = (hd1) & SATA3 = (hd2). However the kernel sees
it differently: SATA1 = /dev/sdb, SATA2 = /dev/sdc & SATA3 = /dev/sda.
All the boot stuff is installed in /dev/sda1, but then at bootup time
that
partition appears as (hd2,0) to grub, not (hd0,0).

Any ideas how to fix this? Or should I just live with it.

Leigh.

<posted & mailed>

leigh wrote:

> Upon further investigation, I discovered the problem is with ordering
> of the
> SATA disks. The disks are connected to connectors SATA1, SATA2, SATA3
> on the motherboard, and they are seen as such by grub at bootup:
> SATA1 = (hd0), SATA2 = (hd1) & SATA3 = (hd2). However the kernel sees
> it differently: SATA1 = /dev/sdb, SATA2 = /dev/sdc & SATA3 = /dev/sda.
> All the boot stuff is installed in /dev/sda1, but then at bootup time
> that
> partition appears as (hd2,0) to grub, not (hd0,0).
>
> Any ideas how to fix this? Or should I just live with it.

You could try "grub-install --recheck /dev/<whatever>"

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland