Multibooting with SATA drive - very confused

[PhilW]

Hi folks,

I'm having problems setting up a multiboot system. My mobo is an Asus P4P800-SE, and I'm running three harddrives, a 160 GB SATA (NTFS) two IDEs, 80 and 60 GB (FAT32) . I have the two IDEs set up as masters on separate controllers.

In BIOS the 80 gig shows up as disk 1, the 60 as disk 2, and the SATA as disk three. However, in XP the SATA is my C drive; XP is installed there, and I boot from there. The IDE drives are D: and E:.

I want to install some flavor of Linux on E: and multiboot between that and C:, with D: as storage, video, etc. Of course I'll have to repartition the disk but that's not my problem.

The problem is, I haven't been able to find a boot manager that can see the SATA drive. It shows up fine in Partition Magic, and obviously XP uses it, but none of the boot managers see it at all. They all want to install to D:, presumably because it shows as disk 1 in BIOS. I've tried BootMagic (8.0), OSL2000, MasterBooter, MSTBoot, etc. I even installed RedHat on E: and tried GRUB. No luck.

Any suggestions? I know there must be a way around this.

Thanks,
Phil

[Dark_Link2135]

this is hard for me to explain...im not good with words.

but basically all the partitions are still the same. windows just assigns drive letters to the disk partitions as it sees them. thus windows 98 might label the partitions different then windows xp. the best way to solve this confusing mess is to use volume labels. in windows explorer, right click the partition, and choose to rename it. or use properties and change the volume label from there

hope that helps you, but sorry i cant help with the bootloader

[PhilW]

Thanks Dark_link,

The partitioning isn't a problem. I can set up all kinds of partitions on each of the three disks, and XP can see them all. It's the boot managers that can't see the SATA drive.

Maybe I should unplug the two IDE drives and THEN try installing a boot manager.

[Dark_Link2135]

Thanks Dark_link,

The partitioning isn't a problem. I can set up all kinds of partitions on each of the three disks, and XP can see them all. It's the boot managers that can't see the SATA drive.

Maybe I should unplug the two IDE drives and THEN try installing a boot manager.

that might possibly work, but i cant see how it would be interfering. is the SATA drive your boot drive for all installed operating systems?

i am currently running a triple boot system with XP Home 98 SE, and Mandrake Linux 10, all on a 80GB SATA drive, not in RAID. my only problem is that 98 freezes on the windows cloads screen, and refuses to go further.

Mandrake 10 includes LILO (bootloader) and support for 64 bit processors, a plus in my case since i have an amd 64 2800+. however, if you have a 32-bit, go with madrake 9.2, since you will take a large performance hit running 64-bit code on a 32 bit processor. the processor can do this, but only by breaking the code down into 32-bit chunks, considerably increasing the time taken to process any commands

Mandrake 10 also by default includes support for Serial ATA drives, which makes installatoin a breeze.

i had trouble loading SATA drivers to 9.2, and since im not an experienced linux user, i didnt want to recompile the kernel to attempt making it work

i would check your motherboards manufacturer site to look for the latest bios and drivers.

if this still doesnt work, ive pretty much exhausted all my knowledge on the subject. theres probably still more that would come to mind if i was prompted, but nothing more now.

hope you can get it working!!!

[PhilW]

Right now the only OS I have installed is WinXP Home, and it is on the SATA drive. I was able to install Redhat 9 to the second IDE drive, but it put Grub on the first IDE. Didn't even ask for my opinion on the matter!

I've checked for BIOS updates from Asus, but apparently I'm up to date.

I wonder if most boot manager software just doesn't look for more than two controllers? That would normally be four disks, unless you do things in an abnormal manner like me.

[sechs]

The issue is with Linux misidentifying the boot order. You can boot into Linux and move the boot loader, or just use the NT OS loader.

This may be useful:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+NT-Loader.html