[TriLUG] Grub vs Removable HDs

[Brian Henning]

Oops.. sent from the wrong account again...


Hi Y'all,
  I use grub as my bootloader to select between Linux and XP Pro.

I just purchased two removable IDE drive caddies, and they hang off the
primary channel of a PCI IDE card (Promise Ultra100).  The drive with
/boot/grub/grub.conf is the master on the second IDE channel of the Promise
card.  Windows lives on the primary master of the mobo's controller.

Grub doesn't like it /at all/ when the number of connected drives changes.
Probably because it seems to want to renumber the drives on the fly; ide2-ma
is hd4 if ide1-ma and ide1-sl are present, but ide2-ma becomes hd2 if
ide1-ma and ide1-sl have been disconnected.  That's bad, because then grub
exits with an Error 21 upon boot up.

One potential solution would be to have the /boot partitioned drive on
ide1-ma and the removables on ide2, so that /boot is always on hd2.. but my
IDE cables won't reach to connect it that way.

So how do I make grub not care if the removable HDs are there or not?  I
don't want to have to use rescue mode and reinstall grub to my MBR every
time I change the removable configuration..

Thanks,
~Brian