I'm still having conceptual trouble with this one.

I have two PATA and two SATA disks in my home system. When the system comes up, these are, espectively, /dev/hda, /dev/hdb, /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. I have the boot order of the drives in the boot PROM set to boot from /dev/sda (hard drive 2), then /dev/hda (hd 0), and usually that works fine. /dev/sda is properly set up with the MBR and /boot lives there as well.

However, when the system has to be shut down, usually for some length of time more than just a few seconds, when it comes back up, it can't find the boot image.

I forgot how I got around this the first time. The second time, when it wasn't booting past the "GRUB" part of the grub announcement, I used the installation disk, booted into linux resuce mode, chroot'd to the actual system disk and re-did grub-install. Still, a few days later (last Tuesday) when my video card went south, I just edited the grub boot line to use root(hd2, 0) and it came up, followed by several reboots with unmodified grub config lines.

I guess I'm wondering if there's some more permanent way around this issue. Do I need to overwrite the MBR on hd0? Should I reconfigure the system so the PATA drives are not connected to the m/b at all (i.e., usb enclosures)? Is this a bug in grub? All this is assuming that I do not get rid of the PATA drives and/or get a new m/b that has <something else>....

It seems strange that this should be such a pain, even though in a rather oddball way it makes sense.

Thoughts?

Thanks

mhr