First thing, I recently installed Mandrake 10 in a PC with an Elitegroup K8M800-M2 motherboard. I had at the time 3 HDD's'in the PC, these HDD,s are IDE HDD not SATA. I noticed that mandrake saw primary master as hde and primary slave and hdf, I dont remember how it saw the 3rd HDD which was secondary slave. I thought nothing of primary master being hde etc and put it down to the 'odd' setup I had. BUT I have just reinstalled mandrake in the PC but with only 1 HDD present, a 320G maxtor, it is still seen as hde, .

A simple question, why is primary master being seen as hde and not hda?

With XP on one HDD and Mandrake on another HDD and both being the only OS and HDD in the PC during their installation both HDD's have their own MBR's, if I then put the HDD's in with the XP HDD as primary master and the Mandrake HDD as primary slave the PC boots, as expected, to XP. I can however select the boot device during POST? and if I select the 'boot primary slave' I get to LILO on the primary slave. From there if I choose to boot linux the boot crashes, I think with the message "cant find INIT". I would guess that this is due to LILO being configured for the situation when mandrake was on hde and since it is now on hdf all the boot settings are wrong.
I believe that you are supposed to be able to use the installation CD/DVD via the rescue mode to correct the 'error' in LILO but I havent been able to get that to work yet. I also think that a run through the update mode would 'correct' LILO but I was wondering...................

During a recue mode attempt, is it possible from the command line to 'edit LILO' to fit the new circumstances?


To my uninformed mind whatever portion of LILO is at work during this early stage of the boot process it is essentially going

"oi put 'this' 'here' and 'that' 'there' "

the problem being that these are screwed up


Thanks

Some IDE controllers, especially plugin ones like Promise, etc, can be detected as hde/hdf because the motherboard normally has two slots that take hda/hdb and hdc/hdd.

Yes, during rescue mode you can mount the partition where /etc/lilo.conf is and edit it, then run lilo to reset it. Grub is the only one though that can be edited on-the-fly when you boot the computer without rescue cd.

Ta, for both bits, the latter has just made me think, "when does an OS 'find' the new partition configurations". I suppose its common sense that that has occurred by the time that BIOS hands over control to LILO or that it is part of the hand over process.
I'll have a play with one of the older PC's in case I beep beep things up.