Re: Some grub2 problems/questions

[walt <wa1ter@myrealbox.com>]

Robert Millan wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 26, 2007 at 12:26:03PM -0800, walt wrote:
...
>> The first machine has two ordinary PATA drives on a VIA 8235 controller
>> and grub2 complains that the firmware is tainted.  Grub2 will use (ata1)
>> okay and lists all the partitions,
> 
> Nice.  Is that controller in the PCI bus?  It's strange that you got it
> working on real hardware (i.e. not qemu) because PCI wasn't implemented
> yet.

Yes.  However, I'm saying that grub2 works as of today, not 10-31.

>> The other Athlon machine has one PATA drive on a VIA 8235 controller
>> and one SATA drive on a Promise controller.  This machine makes it
>> through grub_ata_dumpinfo for both disks but then it hangs forever
>> without printing anything else.

> Could you re-run this part with `debug' variable set to `ata'
> ("set debug=ata", then "insmod ata") and see what's the last thing
> printed ?

Ah, I didn't notice before that grub2 only recognizes the PATA drive
and the cd-burner on the PATA controller.  Grub2 stops dumping
info after the cd-burner and never gets to the SATA disk on the
Promise controller.  The Promise controller is built into the mobo
and the BIOS recognizes it and will boot from it, but the ata module
in grub2 will not.  Would this explain why grub2 hangs?

I should mention that I've never installed grub2 because I don't
really want it on my boot record yet.  I build the grub2 image using
./grub-mkimage -d . -o mygrub *.mod (as I read on the wiki) and then
use old grub to load grub2.  I loaded ata.mod by accident because I'm
too lazy to type all of those module names :o)  I certainly don't
mind testing and debugging the ata module, though, if I can be of
any help to you.