Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 435878
Installer enumerates drives strangely on a three drive system producing an unbootable system
Last modified: 2008-05-18 18:00:01 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12 Description of problem: A three drive system - the boot drive attached to the motherboard PATA controller - other two drives attached to a Promise Ultra100/133TX2 two channel PCI card - drives used to be called hda, hde and hdg - on a working system these drives are now sda (boot), sdb and sdc The installer calls the boot disk hd2/sdc and proceeds to install normally. When rebooting the system after installation, GRUB cannot find the boot partition on disk hd2 because it will see the boot disk as hd0 Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Fedora 8 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install system with additional disks connected to a PCI PATA controller 2. Reboot after installation Actual Results: GRUB unable to boot the system Expected Results: GRUB should be able to boot Additional info: This problem can be solved by the following steps - after installation boot with the rescue disk - chroot /mnt/sysimage - edit /boot/grub/grub.conf replacing references to hd2 width hd0 - reboot
Unfortunately, PC hardware doesn't really give a reliable way of mapping from BIOS drives to any other way of knowing the drives. We use what's there, but a lot of hardware still doesn't support it. This is why on the primary partitioning screen, we now ask the question "where do you want to install the bootloader" and we then take the guess that that is the first bios drive. Also, I've reworked the main bootloader screen so that things are clearer as to what your drive order is and make that clearer.
In Fedora 9 hardware probing and detection is based on HAL and udev. This causes anaconda to have the same view of the disks as the normal installed system. This simply means that as of Fedora 9 the problem seems to be solved.