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. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com