couldn't boot linux without floppy - NOW FIXED

[John Lindinger]

My goodness...  after living with a work-around (booting RedHat Linux) from floppy for
ten months, I think I finally got the problem licked.

My box ran from scsi hard drives, and RH 7.0 worked fine.  Then, after I installed RH 7.2
with software raid, I had to keep the emergency floppy in the drive to get the system to
boot. 

This week I installed a hardware raid controller (Mylex AcceleRAID 250) and proceeded to
install RH 8. The dang boot problem continued, I still need the emergency floppy or it
won't boot. Without the floppy, my bios gives message "no system disk".  

I started through the RH 8 install a second time...

Ah Ha!!!  This time, I noticed something.  I realized that the anaconda installer, by
default, wants to put the GRUB boot loader in the MBR on "hda" (my IDE ZIP disk) rather
than on my raid controller's disk array.  Geeze...  the anaconda went through the entire
install process, placing the GRUB boot loader on the ZIP drive (not really, there was not
any media in the drive).  The only error message was at the front end, when anaconda said
it could not read my disk partitions. So I chose the option to delete all partitions and
proceed.  Anaconda never griped again that drive "hda" had a problem [ like no media
installed ].  Linux ran fine so long as I booted from the emergency floppy.

Anyway, I am doing the RH 8 install a third time as we speak.  This time, I changed the
boot order within the "advanced options" dialog, promoting my raid controller above the
IDE controller.  Anaconda now will put the GRUB in the MBR on the raid array. , I feel
certain the system will successfully boot from the raid array once it is done. 

We shall see...

=====
.
.
.                       |/
John Lindinger         (o o)
-------------------oOo--(_)--oOo-------

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com