I needed to pull an ailing ATA disk from my system so I popped it out and installed a new SATA drive. At the same time I decided to install Hardy from a CD. I had been running Edgy until the distros were pulled out from under me. I like to do clean installs and keep the old system around until I make sure I've got everything working the way I like it.
It all went OK until I rebooted. Grub claims to have written the MBR but instead of booting from my new partition, it booted the old version. I could tell because the list of boot options was the old one. I added a couple of lines to the old menu.lst file so I could boot the new system and it's happy, but I was just wondering what might have gone wrong?
The new partition is on the third disk in the string. There is one ATA drive and two SATA drives.
Code:
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0000855d
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 2433 19543041 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 2434 19457 136745280 83 Linux
Disk /dev/sdb: 203.9 GB, 203928109056 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24792 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000b85b0
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 2479 19912536 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 2480 2734 2048287+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb3 * 2735 3463 5855692+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb4 3464 24792 171325192+ 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 3464 4132 5373711 83 Linux
/dev/sdb6 4133 5348 9767488+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb7 5349 5956 4883728+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb8 5957 6902 7598713+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb9 6903 7717 6546456 83 Linux
/dev/sdb10 7718 13796 48829536 83 Linux
/dev/sdb11 13797 19875 48829536 83 Linux
/dev/sdb12 19876 24792 39495771 83 Linux
Disk /dev/sdc: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0000f1c1
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 1 6079 48829536 83 Linux
I noticed that the boot flag isn't set for /dev/sdc1 which is the new Hardy root device. If it was necessary, shouldn't the install have set it?
It's working fine, but I've had this happen before and always wondered what causes it.
/dev/sdb3 is the partition that holds the menu.lst that is being read by grub during boots.
Thanks,
Jim.
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