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ecsedy
August 17th, 2012, 05:00 PM
I have a laptop provided by my company, one implication of which is that I do not have the option of overwriting the MBR on sda or sdb without getting grief. I would like the ability to boot an Ubuntu environment off an eSata drive. The BIOS is locked down so I can't change it. I think the best option is using a rescue grub CD image. When I run the 12.04 live CD I can look at dmesg and see the ahci driver loads and recognizes the eSata drive. I created a rescue iso and it boots fine but does not see the eSata hd2 drive. I tried doing insmod raid but that does not help and the is no ahci.mod available to load. Ideas?

Thanks.

gordintoronto
August 17th, 2012, 10:04 PM
If you can boot from CD, a Grub script might work.

If you can boot from a flash drive, it would make experimenting a lot cheaper. [smile]

ecsedy
August 18th, 2012, 05:29 AM
Trying to do a grub-mkconfig which doesn't work since I am running a live CD. Apparently you can make it work if you do a chroot.

ecsedy
August 19th, 2012, 12:58 AM
So rather than playing around with the live CD I scrounged up an old USB enclosure with a 60 GB hard drive in it. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 with no problem. I had to install the xorriso package to do a grub-mkrescue but that was no problem. The interesting thing was that after I installed the OS the grub menu came up and it showed the eSata drive in the menu options (I have an old Windows install on it). I did a grub-mkconfig and followed by a grub-mkrescue. After booting with the rescue iso I created there was the eSata drive listed where it should be. When I tried booting to it I got some message about the UUID of the drive not being found. The script looks like it is trying to do a search based on the fs-uuid and it is not working. Of course if I do a blkid in Ubuntu the drive is there and the fs-uuid is there and correct for the partition. Right now it seems like booting into Ubuntu works because it loads some driver that grub does not and that's why grub does not see the eSata drive. Grub sees USB drives just fine, though. The chip in the laptop is an Intel Series 5 SATA chip set to RAID, not AHCI. Ideas?

ecsedy
August 20th, 2012, 02:44 AM
So I built and installed the latest grub 2.00 from source because it does have an ahci module. When I get the grub command prompt and load the ahci module the ls command returns a blank line. Any other command returns a message saying device hd2 can't be found.