Hi Norman,
If this is similar to the HP Dual CPU systems then you probably need to
check the BIOS and the SCSI drive settings. I had an (A500 I think) a
dual HP workstation at work that refused to boot grub and later got it
to function by changing the SCSI drive from 'autoconfigured' to a
specific id and then setting the BIOS appropriately.
This whole things confuse me a lot. First of all I don't know what
the bios (or the scsi adaptor) calls the only hard drive I have.
GRUB finds everything below (hd1,0). When I get into the scsi
configuration menu I read as the disk to be id=0, which I assume
comes from the disk not having any jumper (?). I followed your
advice and changed the id to 1, but no avail. I only see 3 options
for playing with scsi issues in the BIOS configuration menu, and
it pertains to use it as boot device and enabling/disabling
ultra-scsi.
One could guess it is technically the onboard SCSI trying to
autoconfigure in conjunction with the BIOS, but they both affect each
other and the drive ordering as far as GRUB is concerned.
It appears that when I installed grub, it properly wrote in the
MBR, otherwise it wouldn't be giving me the message "grub hard disk
error". In fact I dumped the contents of the MBR using "dd" and it
looks like stage1. I read somewhere that this message is related
to proper/improper reading of the disk geometries, which would
indicate that is not related to the id of the device, or am I
missing something? I feel a bit frustrated now, ready to fork out
a few bucks on a IDE disk, or should I keep some hope?
Cheers,
Dan