[CentOS] OT: Dell BIOS and mixed drives

Tue Jan 15 17:34:08 UTC 2008
Barry Schiffman <schiffo2000 at yahoo.com>

I have a Dell Precision 360, which has both onboard
SATA and ultra ATA controllers, and I put one of each
kind of drive into the bays to make an experimental
machine with the xen kernel. 

After enabling both of drives, the BIOS recognizes
each drive, but it fails to boot, giving me the
message "secondary drive 1 not found". The BIOS gives
me a choice of going ahead or going to setup. Choosing
'continue anyway' has no effect.

I can circumvent this going to F12 to manually choose
to boot from the 'Primary Master' (rather than the
SATA primary, or the CD, or Hard Disk Drive C:). I
still get the warning about secondary drive 1 not
found, but now I can choose to go ahead. At this
point, grub takes over and everything is fine, boots
fine, both drives show up. 

In fact, I installed CentOS from the DVD, and during
installation there was no hint of a problem with using
the two drives.

In the BIOS setup, I do not get all the drives to
choose from -- just Hard Disk Drive C: and the CD. 

Can anyone suggest a way around this?




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