I have a BioStar IDEQ 200V with M7VBA motherboard. This board
supports SATA through the VIA 8237 SATA chip. The SATA works,
too - I'm using the Linux 2.6.1 kernel, which supports that chip, and in
addition to the "standard" ATA-100 drive I installed a Seagate SATA
drive - it's recognized as /dev/hdg and I can read and write from/to
it. In fact, I copied over the whole ATA-100 drive to it.
I can even boot from the SATA drive by going through the first stage
boot on the ATA-100 drive, and then specifying the hdg boot partition
on the boot splash screen command line. After boot, I'm running on the
SATA drive.
Here's the problem. I can't install grub on the MBR on the SATA
drive. When I do grub-install /dev/hdg I get "/dev/hdg does not have
any corresponding BIOS drive". And I think that's true - when I go
into the (Award Phoenix-BIOS) setup screens, there's *no reference*
to the SATA drives. In fact, the SATA drives appear to have a separate
BIOS provided by VIA, maker of the 8237 SATA chip.
I'm under the impression people use Grub to boot from SCSI drives,
which are not identified in the BIOS, and have their own BIOS's. But
I can't figure out how to do it for this SATA drive. Can someone tell
me or point me to something that says how?