On Fri, 2006-06-09 at 18:31 +0200, Kai Schaetzl wrote:
IDE, on the other hand
does not shift the bios view of the drives so some of the HOWTO instructions you'll find for hand-installing grub take this into account.
It still seems to boot the same OS from the grub.conf, though. No matter which of the two disks is powered down. It always boot my default and not the fallback which it should boot theoretically once the first disk is gone.
If you followed the HOWTO you may have accounted for the different drive in the grub setup.
However, most of the ways that IDE drives fail will make
the machine unbootable until you open the case and unplug it.
Yes, I feared this. It's a bit hard to establish such a situation for testing, though ;-) How to maske a disk fail without damaging it? How can I nuke the grub on the first disk to see what happens?
Power down and pull the cable from the drive.
Then
you may have to adjust the bios settings to boot from the other position - but while you have the case open it is probably easier to shift the jumper or cable position so the working drive is the primary. Then if you followed one of the sets of instructions, grub will load but will be looking for the now-missing 2nd drive for the /boot partition to load the kernel. SATA probably has it's own way of doing things too.
Didn't have these problems here.
You can't emulate that problem without a broken drive. Some failure modes just hang forever and the machine will never go on to the next one as long as the bad one is connected.
Maybe... It's not that hard to do it by hand. Do an fdisk -l on the existing drive, then an interactive fdisk of the new mate, creating the same sized partitions with type FD.
I hate to use fdisk, haven't done this for a long time. If there are GUI ways I much prefer them in a few cases over command line :-)
And I hate to use things where I can't look at the results before the final save.