Booting up gentoo

dmmedia · n00b Joined: 13 Nov 2005 Posts: 7

Hi,

I have tryed several linux distributions already, but still in trouble.
Hardware is:
AMD based PC, on nForce2 chipset with integrated SATA.
2 hard disks: 1 IDE and 1 SATA

I have installed linux onto an IDE drive and GRUB into its MBR.
Also I have Windows XP on SATA drive with its loader in SATAs MBR.
So I do not want systems to interfere each other.
But when I set up bios to boot off IDE hard disk, I still get into Windows,
even without showing GRUB menu.

I have tryed debian, fedora and now gentoo, and still cannot boot up.

I hope, you might help me.

JPMRaptor · Guru Joined: 04 Oct 2002 Posts: 410 Location: Maryland

It may be a problem with your BIOS. Is there a reason you don't want to put grub on your SATA MBR? You can set it up to have Windows as one of your boot options and they won't "interfere" with each other.
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dmmedia · n00b Joined: 13 Nov 2005 Posts: 7

Thank you for your reply.
I have found the problem and it was really in BIOS.

Strange thing happens: when you have IDE settings set to auto,
then BIOS does not search for an IDE hard drive.
I tryed switching off SATA in BIOS and got BOOT DISK FAILURE after POST.
But when I saved IDE info into CMOS, then GRUB starts perfectly and begin to load linux.

This has happened with Gigabyte GA-N400Pro motherboard

HackingM2 · Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2005 3:01 pm Post subject:

Cool. Glad to hear you got it working in the end.

If you feel that this problem is solved can you please edit the title of your first post to reflect this - IE put [SOLVED] or something similar in there.

Thanks.