Showing posts with label PC Hardware Issues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PC Hardware Issues. Show all posts

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Final puzzlement....

W4UOA (the ham computer) is a dual boot machine: Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux

The BIOS reports the following ports in use:

SATA Port-0 : WDC WD7500AAKS (XP OS)
SATA Port-1 : WDC WD3200YS (NTFS backup drive)
PATA Primary Master : DVDRW
PATA Primary Slave : Maxtor 5T060H6 (Ubuntu Linux OS)

The BIOS reports the following boot order for the hard drives:

1st Drive 3S-Maxtor 5T060H6 (Ubuntu Linux OS) -- Using GRUB to manage dual boot.
2nd Drive SM-WDC WD3200YS (NTFS backup drive)
3rd Drive PM-WDC WD7500AAKS (XP OS)

GRUB's menu.lst requires the following commands to boot from the XP drive WD7500AAKS:

root (hd2,0)
map (hd0) (hd2)
map (hd2) (hd0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

I assumed the drive order used by GRUB would be the order shown in the SATA and PATA port list. As such I started with GRUB commands that pointed to (hd0) as the XP boot drive. This did not work. Once I worked with the boot order, which makes the XP drive hd2, it boots into XP.