Boot Failure

[baileyone82]

Hello,

I have installed Ubuntu 6.10, Edgy Eft, and have been using happily for a few months now. When I built the machine, I had 4 SATA hard drives. I went ahead and installed on the first one and the other three were just sitting there unused the whole time.

I decided it was time to use them, so I cranked up gpartd and partitioned/formatted them (using ext3). I mounted them successfully using the mount command. Everything was going well, so I followed some directions to edit /etc/fstab so they would mount automatically at startup.

When I rebooted, nothing happened after BIOS. I figured that my /etc/fstab changes must have messed something up, so I used the install CD to mount the first primary hd and I put the original /etc/fstab back. But still nothing. When I tried to start the computer, I get nothing after BIOS. It just sits there.

Any ideas what I messed up or how to fix it? Thanks!

[david_2001]

My first thought would be to check BIOS settings for the SATA interface. Formatting those three other drives may have confused the BIOS into thinking that you now have a RAID. For example, the BIOS in my system defaults to RAID for SATA drives - I have two and they are not set up as a RAID - and it will not boot unless the RAID functionality is disabled.

[baileyone82]

Thanks - that was a great idea. My motherboard has two software raid controllers.

Unfortunately, I double-checked and both are disabled. I am not getting an error message from BIOS about invalid boot disk - it is simply frozen after listing out a bunch of items/addresses. I think the last one it spits out is ACPI 9.

Any other good ideas?

[david_2001]

Thanks - that was a great idea. My motherboard has two software raid controllers.

Unfortunately, I double-checked and both are disabled. I am not getting an error message from BIOS about invalid boot disk - it is simply frozen after listing out a bunch of items/addresses. I think the last one it spits out is ACPI 9.

Any other good ideas?
Even though there is a lack of an invalid boot disk message, I would still want to check that:

The disk with Ubuntu installed is connected to the primary SATA connector of the first SATA controller on the motherboard.
This drive is selected in BIOS as the first hard disk boot device.

EDIT: "ACPI 9" is probably just information about the IRQ assigned to the acpi service.
EDIT: Try also resetting the BIOS, i.e. by selecting the load optimized defaults, or whatever it might be called, option. (Check that the SATA interfaces aren't set to RAID afterwards.)