How to boot to the Primary Slave Drive

[matt_thumper]

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?


TIA,
Matt

[matt_thumper]

BTW, 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

[devils casper]

Hi and Welcome !

Its a BIOS/GRUB compatibility problem. Is there any other OS installed in Primary Harddisk? Is it possible for you to switch Hard disk in the box?

Lets check partition structure of your Hard disk.
Execute fdisk -l command in terminal and post output here.

su -
/sbin/fdisk -l

Its small L in fdisk -l.

[Rubberman]

If the default image (0) in your grub.conf is on the slave drive, and the grub bootloader is properly configured, then it should boot to that OS automatically. From what you are saying, you may not have done so, otherwise there would also be an entry for your Windows OS in the grub.conf file I believe, so it would appear as an option in the grub menu.

[matt_thumper]

Here it is:
/sbin/fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 38913 312568641 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/hdb: 80.0 GB, 80000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9726 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hdb2 14 9726 78019672+ 8e Linux LVM

[matt_thumper]

If the default image (0) in your grub.conf is on the slave drive, and the grub bootloader is properly configured, then it should boot to that OS automatically. From what you are saying, you may not have done so, otherwise there would also be an entry for your Windows OS in the grub.conf file I believe, so it would appear as an option in the grub menu.

There is no Windows OS involved here, just Red Hat.

[Rubberman]

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!