10 SCSI Disk with 2 AIC7770 Controllers, 1 IDE

[Sampson Fung]

Dear All,

I have been "playing" with GRUB in the past two days.
Reading the "Multi boot with GRUB" HowTos, GRUB FAQs and INFO pages, and 
still cannot have my setup working.

Initially, I have the following setup:
GRUB v0.92 (comes with RH8.0)
In BIOS, I have SCSI booted first.
/dev/hda1       FAT32 data
# On the "First" AIC7770 card
/dev/sda1       100MB   ext3    RH Boot
/dev/sdb1       2GB     ext3    RH8wks
/dev/sdc1       4GB     FAT32   W2K
/dev/sdd1       4GB     ext3    RH81wks
/dev/sde1       4GB     ext3    RH81svr
# On the "Second" AIC7770 card
/dev/sdf1       2GB
/dev/sdg1       2GB     linux raid
/dev/sdh1       2GB     linux raid
/dev/sdi1       2GB     linux raid
/dev/sdj1       2GB     linux raid

Everything works fine until W2K was installed.
W2K was installed to /dev/sdc1 when all other disks are taken offline.
That is, /dev/sdc1 (when installing W2K, it is /dev/sda1, of course) is 
the only disk detected by the installer.

My TARGET is to boot W2K on /dev/sdc1 in via GRUB by a suitable entry in 
menu.lst.

So, following the HowTo's, I quickly come up with the following entrys:


title RH8 workstation
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz ro root=/dev/sdb1
        initrd /initrd.img

title   W2K
        map (hd2,hd0)
        map (hd0,hd2)
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1
        makeactive

title RH phoebe beta workstation
        root (hd3,0)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/sdd1
        initrd /boot/initrd.img

title RH phoebe beta server
        root (hd4,0)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/sde1
        initrd /boot/initrd.img

All the RH entries boots fine, except the W2K one.
My machine seems to be hanging with a "Loading stage2" message in the 
top-left corner.

After a lot of "playing", I give up with the above config and comes up 
with my second setup:

GRUB v0.92 (comes with RH8.0)
In BIOS, I have IDE booted first.
/dev/hda1       50MB    FAT32 W2K bootloader (ntldr, ntdetect, etc)
/dev/hda5       remaining       FAT32 data
# On the "First" AIC7770 card
/dev/sda1       100MB   ext3    RH Boot
/dev/sdb1       2GB     ext3    RH8wks
/dev/sdc1       4GB     FAT32   W2K
/dev/sdd1       4GB     ext3    RH81wks
/dev/sde1       4GB     ext3    RH81svr
# On the "Second" AIC7770 card
/dev/sdf1       2GB     FAT32 data
/dev/sdg1       2GB     linux raid
/dev/sdh1       2GB     linux raid
/dev/sdi1       2GB     linux raid
/dev/sdj1       2GB     linux raid

I install GRUB to /dev/hda with
>root (hd1,0)
>setup (hd0)

my W2K menu entry is changed to:

title   W2K
#       map (hd2,hd0)
#       map (hd0,hd2)
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1
        makeactive

Then it boots OK.

I want to know, what is the problem with my first setup?  Is it 
supportted by GRUB?

And, it seems that GRUB can only handle 8 devices in total (not counting 
/dev/fd0), so in my second setup, if set SCSI boot first, I cannot 
access /dev/hda at all.

I just downloaded GRUB v0.93, but wondering how to get it installed over 
the v0.92 I am currently using.  Is there any changes that may make my 
first setup works?

Best Regards,
Sampson Fung
A new comer to Kernel Testing.