Hello, I have a Dell Dimension 4400 (BIOS A02) which I've upgraded over the years and it is now our secondary home computer and it's running RedHat Linux. It has two hard drives in it, like when it used to be a Windows machine. Then, they were C:\ and D:\. The problem is that in order for me to successfully boot up RedHat I have to hit F12 and go into the Dell boot menu: Boot Device Menu ================ 1. Normal 2. Primary Master Drive 3. Primary Slave Drive 4. Diskette Drive 5. Hard-Disk Drive C: 6. IDE CD-ROM Device 7. System Setup 8. IDE Drive Diagnostics 9. Boot to Utility Partition Enter a choice: 1 ---- And there I have to change the '1' (Normal, whatever that is....) to a '3' (Primary Slave Drive ). Then it boots up just fine. (If I just let the Dell default-boot, it goes into a DOS-like window with GRUB in the upper-left, but GRUB doesn't accept any keyboard input) My Dell boot sequence interface only gives me 3 options and I can't add to them: 1. Diskette Drive 2. Hard-Disk Drive C:\ 3. IDE CD-ROM Device So I don't see a way to tell it to boot from the 'Primary Slave Drive'. Can I change the BIOS to automatically boot to the 'Primary Slave Drive'? If so, how do I do it. Or, how do I change RedHat to boot up automatically? My grub.conf is: # grub.conf generated by anaconda # # Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file # NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that # all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg. # root (hd0,0) # kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 # initrd /initrd-version.img #boot=/dev/hdb default=0 timeout=5 splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz hiddenmenu title Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client (2.6.18-164.el5) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-164.el5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet crashkernel=128M@16M initrd /initrd-2.6.18-164.el5.img TIA, Matt
Ok. I see that somehow the slave drive got configured as the boot drive, and probably the grub boot loader got installed there by mistake, resulting in your need to tell the system to boot from the slave. You should be able to rewrite the grub boot loader to the master drive (/dev/hda) so that it will vector properly to the /dev/hdb1 partition to boot the system. You should be able to use the grub-install tool to do that. Unfortunately I have never needed to do this, so caveat user! Make sure you backup everything first!
