Multiboot when BIOS is brain dead

[Bhavesh Davda]

I've explored every avenue to find the answer, including looking at
the grub-legacy sources for an answer.

I have a brain-dead BIOS that only lets me boot from "a" given hard
drive, that can be either of the IDE drive connected to the on-board
IDE controller (hda) or one of the two SCSI drives connected to an
on-board SCSI controller (sda or sdb).

I've installed RHEL4 on sda, installed GRUB on the MBR of sda, chosen
to boot from sda in the BIOS, and alls well as far as that is
concerned.

I've now installed a different flavour of Linux on sdb, installed GRUB
on sdb1 instead of the MBR, and would now like to boot into it from my
GRUB installation on the MBR of sda.

I've tried "rootnoverify (hd2,0)" (sdb1 is the / partition on my sdb
installation) and "chainloader +1", after verifying from a grub shell
that (hd2,0) is indeed mapped to sdb1, and verifying the same in
device.map.

Yet when I attempt booting into sdb1, I get a Stage 1 "Read Error".

Looking into the sources, I can infer the read error happens because
the BIOS int 0x13/function 0x2 failed on the sdb drive.

How do I make this work?

Thanks!

--
Bhavesh P. Davda