Re: Error 21 with grub > 0.92 and Highpoint HPT370

[Jeroen Dekkers]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2004 at 01:58:13PM +0100, Georg Sauthoff wrote:
> I am using a 80GB harddisk attached to an additional IDE onboard controller 
> (Highpoint HPT370).
> Embedding e2fs_stage1_5 from the small 1st partition (16MB) of the harddisk 
> works fine with grub 0.92.
> 
> But with grub 0.93 and 0.94 I get Error 21 at system startup from grub.
> 
> It is a Abit 'KT7A raid' board with VIA KT133a chipset. And of course I am 
> not 
> using the pseudo raid feature of the Highpoint controller.

Your problem seems to be the same as bug number 6846
(https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=6846). If I
look at the changes between 0.92 and 0.93 I think the only change
which can give these problems is this one:

2002-04-04  Yoshinori K. Okuji  <address@hidden>

        * stage2/builtins.c (setup_func): Don't embed a drive number, if
        unnecessary.
        
Looking at the code I see that the older code is still there but not
used. The comments say the older code was needed because of some
buggy BIOSes, but with other buggy BIOSes it could trash the booting
drive. Maybe we should switch back to the older code or add a
--workaround argument to setup so if you get this error you can use
setup --workaround to install this workaround. 

For now, if you change the "#if 1" into "#if 0" in the function
setup_func in grub/stage/builtins.c, does the problem go away?

-- 
Jeroen Dekkers