My system has a couple of SATA drives. The one mainboard IDE port is
connected to a DVD+RW. I had two older IDE drives connected to an older
Promise PCI/IDE card. At some point a couple of months ago, the system
stopped booting before it even got to grub. My first suspicion was a problem
with the IDE drives.
The next line should have read *unplugged the Promise card* <<<<
I unplugged them one at a time, and still no boot. Plugged in the promise
card and the system booted fine. I replaced the card. With the new card, it
got to the point where it recognized the PCI card BIOS, but would not load
grub. The system boots fine with the card installed, but no drives plugged
in.
Both IDE drives are working fine when plugged into a USB enclosure.
Last year, a failing BIOS chip caused me to think that I was having drive
problems. This led me to try a bunch of ways of reinstalling grub. Turned
out to be the BIOS chip, and when I got a replacement, everything has worked
fine.
I suspect that the current boot problem is related to the system looking for
grub on one of the IDE drives and not finding it. Grub on the intended boot
SATA drive is working fine.
Does this make sense? Is there a way to insure that only the grub on the SATA
drive is used for booting when the IDE drives are plugged in? The main BIOS
does not see the IDE drives on the PCI card so that setting won't help.
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