More removable drive problems

[Grant Edwards]

I've got a system that has a removable drive on the primary IDE
bus, and a fixed drive on the secondary IDE bus.  I have Linux
installed on the secondary drive.  Using LILO, I could boot the
Linux drive (hdc) whether or not the primary (hda) was present.

When I upgraded to RedHat 7.2, I switched to GRUB (it's the
default, so I figured I'd give it a shot).

Now I can only boot hdc when hda is plugged in. I've tried
mapping the drives before chainloading hdc, but the copy of
GRUB on hdc gets upset if hda isn't there.  Switching back to
LILO will solve that problem, but there are things about GRUB
that I really like (not having to re-install everytime I change
the configuration).

AFAIK, LILO used BIOS to access the drives, so GRUB's behavior
must be a design decision rather than a BIOS limitation.

Is there a way to specify a "physical" drive in GRUB?

Something like

  IDE(1,0,2)  ==  Second IDE bus, master drive, partition 2
  SCSI(0,3,2) ==  First SCSI bus, SCSI ID 3, partition 2

Is there some advantage to GRUB's disk numbering scheme that I
don't understand?

-- 
Grant Edwards
address@hidden