Installing GRUB on 2nd (slave) drive

[Yuan Liu]

This is not exactly a bug report, but rather a feature request.

The situation is, some BIOS (such as the one used in Compaq Presario 
5420; no indication of BIOS vendor or version) has a setting to change 
the bootable disk from the 1st to the 2nd drive on one IDE controller. 
The BIOS will, if the 2nd drive is set as bootable, fake the 2nd drive 
as the 1st when running the boot loader.  Once the OS starts loading, 
the BIOS will stop lying.

GRUB, on the other hand, doesn't have this knowledge.  So when an OS 
tries to set up GRUB, grub will take the true image of the system layout 
into stage 1 and render the boot loader unusable because the BIOS fakes 
layout during boot time.

A full investigation is detailed in the following usenet posting in 
comp.os.linux.setup:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&selm=3D05A27E.8040300%40stemnet.nf.ca

Even from a feature point of view, I can't think of any way to know if 
the BIOS would fake, once grub is running from an OS.  But some hint 
comments in device.map, grub.conf, and grub install/setup commands may help.

Thanks for your consideration.  And thanks for a great product.

Yuan Liu