Mike wrote:
Thanks for the ideas. Unfortunately, the rescue system does not have grub, and attempting to mount the root partition and run grub from there gets odd error messages that the file does not exist.
I've tried every combination of the bios hard drive configuration trying to achieve the effect of getting the ide drive to appear to grub last, but with no luck.
If we assume that the ide drive is messing up the order, how does one reinstall the first stage grub so that it knows the root partition is now on the third drive (instead of the second)?
This is major surgery to your system, and will take a bit of thought to make sure we don't screw up the system beyond recovery. Your last paragraph indicates that you have at least a bit of understanding how grub operates, so you are aware that this certainly is information that can only be stored in the master boot record (stage 1). This is what the device.map file is for -- it is grub's best guess as to the drive configuration necessary for an accurate stage 1 process. Meanwhile, there are some things you can do. First, are you able to boot into Windows with the system as currently configured? If so, the first SATA drive is currently mapped as grub's (hd0), which will simplify things somewhat. When you say that running grub in the rescue system produces a "file not found" error, I presume you mean that /device.map does not exist. If so, run grub again from the rescue system, without parameters, and see if it constructs either /boot/grub/device.map, or /device.map. However, if you meant that you attempted to mount your installed root partition as / in the rescue system, try again mounting it as, say, /mnt and run '/mnt/usr/sbin/grub --device-map=/device.map'. If you don't mean either of these, I am confused as to what you do mean. Are you absolutely certain the rescue system doesn't contain grub? Check /usr/sbin or /. I am pretty sure lilo is on the rescue system, so if grub is absent, that is very strange. Even more strange, how is one supposed to repair or build anew a boot loader whose installer isn't even on the rescue system? The word "rescue" becomes severely diminished with such an absence. If necessary, you can probably copy the necessary files from the installed system into the rescue ramdrive -- it might be necessary to create a new one if the existing one doesn't have enough space -- but we'll worry about all this later if there is an actual need. PS Reply only to the list, please. I won't get your reply any faster when you send me a separate copy.