Re: Boot from Non-BIOS Visible Disk?

[Yedidyah Bar-David]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 02:41:06PM -0800, Randy Broman wrote:
> I have a BioStar IDEQ 200V with M7VBA motherboard. This board
> supports SATA through the VIA 8237 SATA chip. The SATA works,
> too - I'm using the Linux 2.6.1 kernel, which supports that chip, and in
> addition to the "standard" ATA-100 drive I installed a Seagate SATA
> drive - it's recognized as /dev/hdg and I can read and write from/to
> it. In fact, I copied over the whole ATA-100 drive to it.
> 
> I can even boot from the SATA drive by going through the first stage
> boot on the ATA-100 drive, and then specifying the hdg boot partition
> on the boot splash screen command line. After boot, I'm running on the
> SATA drive.
> 
> Here's the problem. I can't install grub on the MBR on the SATA
> drive. When I do grub-install /dev/hdg I get "/dev/hdg does not have
> any corresponding BIOS drive". And I think that's true - when I go
> into the (Award Phoenix-BIOS) setup screens, there's *no reference*
> to the SATA drives. In fact, the SATA drives appear to have a separate
> BIOS provided by VIA, maker of the 8237 SATA chip.
> 
> I'm under the impression people use Grub to boot from SCSI drives,
> which are not identified in the BIOS, and have their own BIOS's. But
> I can't figure out how to do it for this SATA drive. Can someone tell
> me or point me to something that says how? 

You can't boot from a SCSI drive either, unless your SCSI card has a
BIOS that supports booting from it. Most SCSI cards do. I don't know
this board, and didn't try booting from SATA yet. If it does have
support (maybe not enabled by default), you should be able to boot
from it. You might have to choose in the normal BIOS something like
'adapter ROM' or 'SCSI' or something like that.

In any case, this has nothing to do with grub. If you try hard and
no BIOS settings work, your only options are what you already know -
to update the BIOS, boot from somewhere else, etc. If you are really
adventurous, you can try LinuxBIOS (but I must add biostar isn't on
their list of supported boards).
Good luck,
-- 
Didi

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