Hey, got a problem and don’t know if this is a bug to report or if I made some mistakes. Didn’t find any settings to change which MBR the GRUB should be installed during installation. If there only can be one MBR it is a bug, because it choose wrong drive.
I got four SATA drives on a nvidia raid. They are connected two and two. On installation openSuSE 11.0 (64bit) tries to install GRUB on MBR on the second raid, not the first and it doesn’t matter which first in BIOS.
sda__ mapper1
sdb/
sdc__ mapper2 (Installation wants to install GRUB on this)
sdd/
When the second raid are disconnected it is all OK, install, boot and work as openSuSE should. Turn off, reconnect second raid and it work as openSuSE should. Only problem is the installation.
System:
ASUS K8N-DRE, AMD 2x275 Opteron, 4GB ram
NVIDIA nForce 2200 professional (SATA controller), 2x300GB (SATA with raid0), 2x500GB (SATA with raid0)
I don’t recall whether this options is offered during installation. I only have one OS installed on my one drive, so never bothered to check. However, once the install is complete, you can use grub-install to (re)install the MBR.
Yast method would be: Yast > System > Boot Loader > Boot Loader Installation and select the custom option.
The problem was that the system didn’t boot, even after setting the BIOS to start from second raid. My work-around was to disconnect the second raid. Can’t remeber if the GRUB error was 17 or 22, but there were no boot.
(I want to have boot loader on first raid)
In the installation, or in the Repair option on the DVD, you can go into the boot loader dialog and tell SuSE where you want grub installed to (all drives have an MBR, btw). While there, click on the “other” button to the bottom right, and click on “edit configuration files”, then take a look at device.map. Make sure that the mapping agrees with however you have the boot sequence set up in the bios, i.e., the drive aligned to hd0 should be the first boot drive, etc. (Not to be confused with the hardware device sequence; this is the boot sequence, which can be different.)
Back to one of my questions: Is this a bug worth to report that installation don’t choose the first harddrive to install boot loader? I’m bad giving back information about problem so I have to ask.
IMO, no. The installer actually only makes a "recommendation; if you decline that, you can get another recommendation. Or you do it as would be required with Windows - manually. There are many different possible boot permutations. I don’t see how a program can detect and evaluate all of them and be “right” with the recommendation every time. Maybe that’s one reason MS doesn’t even try.