Re: [gentoo-user] Grub on a new disk

[Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com>]

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On Saturday 05 July 2008, Florian Philipp wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Jul 2008 12:18:28 +0100
>
> Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:
> > As far as I can understand the problem arises because you have
> > installed grub everywhere.  When your BIOS kicks in it goes to the
> > first disk's MBR, reads the GRUB boot code, which starts probing each
> > and every device where a GRUB file system exists.  Perhaps it also
> > checks each MBR?  Eventually it arrives at /dev/hdd and GRUB loads up
> > its boot menu.  You can tweak the /boot/grub/device.map file to
> > change the order of the devices and bring up /dev/hdd sooner.
> >
> > Alternatively and probably easier would be to change the boot order
> > of your drives in your BIOS menu.  Since you have installed GRUB in
> > each drive's MBR you should be able to boot straight off your hdd
> > drive.
> >
> > HTH.
>
> I think I've already written that I've installed Grub on every disk
> because I didn't know whether the BIOS allows booting from secondary
> slave and I didn't want to risk an unbootable system.

You should be able to boot and reinstall GRUB in which ever MBR you choose 
with a LiveCD.

> I've already changed the BIOS boot order to look at /dev/hdd's MBR
> first but that didn't help.

Right, have you checked your device.map to see if there's anything untoward in 
there?

> Now the system boots correctly but it takes ages (>10sec) to come 
> from "Grub loading Stage1.5" to "Grub loading, please wait..."

Stage1.5 contains the filesystem driver which will allow GRUB to be able to 
read the fs of hdd on which the /boot/grub/stage2 file is stored.  Since 10 
seconds to read a relatively small file is rather excessive, could it be a 
drive cable/ribbon fault?

> and then another 10sec or more to open the menu.

Ditto.  If it were that the GRUB code in the bootloader went into a loop or 
something, scanning all drives, then by this step it would not need to probe 
or access any other device.  The fact that it takes so long points towards a 
hardware rather than a configuration issue.  Other than that could it be a fs 
corruption problem?  </clutching at straws>

Unless better ideas are proposed you may want to remerge grub, then re-install 
it manually in the first disk MBR using a grub > prompt (as per the handbook) 
and point it's root to your hdd disk.

HTH.
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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