On 11/01/13 12:17:05, steve-alug@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 10/01/13 15:07, Barry Samuels wrote:
I have now received a new PSU so I could fire up the board again. I tried setting the BIOS to defaults - no change. The BIOS was version 8 something and the latest is version 17 something so I updated the BIOS
- no change. I have now rigged the SATA drive as a USB external as
both my main computer and the spare computer will both boot from USB. I have discovered that this drive won't boot on my main computer either so I swapped it over to the spare together with a USB DVD drive with Knoppix on, booted into Knoppix, and re-wrote the MBR using LILO. That drive still won't boot so perhaps it's not the board after all. I can't help feeling that I've done/not done something embarrassingly obvious. I have now gone into 'stumped' mode.
OK, I seem to remember that as well as a MBR, disks have also an Active flag, and a Bootable flag. If either of these flags have become reset, then it won't boot from them. I think you can check and change these flags with fdisk but not sure.
Did Knoppix read the disk was OK? Did you fsck it? If not, perhaps you should, and/or run some other disk tests (system rescue CD or ultimate boot CD)
When you say it "won't boot" - what exactly doesn't it do/does it say? There are different varieties of won't boot - e.g.
Insert system disk - Disk failure, or not connected, or no boot/active flags set
Grub/Lilo menu, then error message - then it's done the first part of the boot and something else is failed/corrupted (e.g. initfamfs)
Good luck Steve
This is the current situation:
I have three 1 TB drives. One is the primary drive in my desktop the other two are backup drives used with rsync so each backup drive should be an identical image of the primary drive.
All drives should boot from hda5 and the boot flag for that partition is set for all drives. The drives are regularly fsck'd.
Contrary to what I said earlier all of those drives will boot in the main desktop but none of them will boot in the spare computer.
The message displayed on the spare computer is something like:
Media failure, check cable No bootable drive
It does seem that the intel board doesn't like these drives for booting. It will read the contents of the drives quite happily when booted with a Knoppix DVD.
It does seem as though the answer might have to be a PCIE/SATA adapter with a boot ROM.
http://www.cclonline.com/product/61964/PEXSATA22I/IDE-SATA-SCSI-Cards/StarTe...