Ubuntu 11.10 fails to boot if i add 2 data drives

Diss · 16 Oct 2011 at 09:03

Hi

Situation is as follows:

* New install of 11.10 - done with just the boot drive in the PC

* PC has hot swap bays and if i boot with just the boot drive installed and then add the data drives they are recognized and all work fine.

* BUT if i leave the 2 data drives in the PC and reboot i get the following error message (which goes away if i disconnect them and reboot)

verifying DMI pool data.....
error : no such device : (then just a sting of numbers/letters)
grub rescue >

Any ideas how i can fix this so i can boot with all 3 drives in the PC?

Many thanks

Diss

PS - another problem just occurred on this boot which i hope will clear on a reboot but is weird - if i try and auto size Firefox to either full or half screen it won't place the window above about half way up the screen - i can drag it up but it won't auto place properly (it was fine earlier today) - any thoughts?

masterluke · 16 Oct 2011 at 19:41

When you have all 3 drives attached perhaps the bios has one of the data drives higher in the boot order than the boot drive? ie - its trying to boot off a data drive.

Diss · 24 Oct 2011 at 13:12

Hi again

thanks for the suggestion - but is it possible to do that for SATA drives - i had a look and they are all set to auto - masterluke, is this correct or am i missing something in the bios?

anyway - it did get me thinking

perhaps what i should have mentioned before is that the original boot partition was for win7 and the install is still there for data purposes but i never boot to windows as i have moved win7 to another PC - i used gparted to change the boot flag from the NTFS partition to the linux partition - but sadly this made no difference at all

i then did "fdisk -l" with just the boot drive in the system i get this:

/dev/sda1 NTFS
sda2 Extended
sda5 Linux
sda6 Swap

however when i then hotswap in the 2 data drives and run fdisk i only get:
/dev/sdc1 NTFS

however if i then run gparted it sees:
sda1 NTFS
sda2 Extended
sda6 swap
sda5 Linux

Does this tell me anything useful?? I have absolutely no idea

Any suggestions for sorting this would be most welcome.

many thanks

diss

masterluke · 24 Oct 2011 at 14:16

The bit that says "auto" i think is a legacy thing from back when hard disk's needed you to set parameters before they would work. Im talking another page entirely where the bios allows you to cheese the order that disks are booted. Like this...

http://www.whitecanyon.com/how-to-change-boot-order.php

.. i may be competely wrong about this being the problem but its worth a go!

Diss · 24 Oct 2011 at 14:22

masterluke said:
The bit that says "auto" i think is a legacy thing from back when hard disk's needed you to set parameters before they would work. Im talking another page entirely where the bios allows you to cheese the order that disks are booted. Like this...

http://www.whitecanyon.com/how-to-change-boot-order.php

.. i may be competely wrong about this being the problem but its worth a go!

THANKYOU

that worked fine

much appreciated

diss