[vox-tech] Plextor PX-712A not working [now i can't boot]

[Dylan Beaudette]

> On Thu 13 Jan 05,  3:29 PM, p <p> said:
>> On Thu 13 Jan 05, 12:22 PM, Ken Herron <kherron+lugod at fmailbox.com>
>> said:
>> > Dylan Beaudette wrote:
>> >
>> > >The [cdrom] drive is connected to the primary IDE channel, and my
>> hard
>> > >drive is connected to a serial IDE channel. As of kernel 2.6 my hard
>> drive
>> > >is accessed as a SCSI device. However, my cdrom drive does not answer
>> to
>> > >requests sent to hda,hdb,hdc,hdd ... nor to any SCSI devices...
>> >
>> > Dylan, are you able to access both the CD and the hard drive from
>> other
>> > operating systems or earlier Linux revisions when they're wired this
>> > way? I wonder if the motherboard has disabled the primary IDE channel
>> > because one of the serial ATA ports is in use, or maybe Linux can't
>> > drive both at the same time for some reason. Perhaps moving the CD to
>> > the secondary IDE bus would do the trick.

UPDATE:
Before touching any hardware this is what I found:
CDROM drive plugged into the Primary PATA connector
Hard Drive plugged into the Primary SATA connector

POST screen lists Hard Disk as being connected to secondary IDE, CDROM
connected to primary

->the BIOS was using AUTO for all configurations of the SATA/PATA subsystem
->the PATA/SATA controller is a ICH5R, but there is an integrated Promise
PDC20378 PATA/SATA controller, which was disabled in the BIOS...


I then attempted to change how the BIOS configured to the SATA/PATA
subsystem on the motherboard, using the ICH5R controller... no combination
of settings would work, and in fact I was able to make the CDROM drive
disapear from the POST screen with one permutation. After giving up, I
reverted all of the BIOS settings to what they had previously been (as far
as I can tell). Now the system will not boot off of the hard drive - i.e.
the grub screen does not even come up!

I was able to boot into KNOPPIX with a 2.4 kernel, and mount my hard
drive, and all seems to be fine.... I suspect that the MBR got hosed
somehow... but this makes no sense to me at all.

>From KNOPPIX i tried to use the grub-install command, using my menu.1st
file as the configuration file. All seemed to work, but the machine still
refuses to load grub at startup...


Any ideas? I am really stuck now!

Dylan