Grub Problems When Using Sata and Ide

Today I finally found some time to upgrade my Desktop PC to Ubuntu 8.0.4. The installation was going flawless, but when the installation was done and the computer was going to reboot I got an Grub error, error 17 to be exactly. It took me about 2 hours to find out, why I got this error and hopefully to be helpfull to others I’m post the cause of the problem and the solution here.

I’m using a combined mode to use SATA and IDE on my motherboad (Aopen AX4C MAX II). Because I got 4 IDE devices and 2 SATA this is the only method to get all of the devices working and recognized by the BIOS. I installed Ubuntu on my SATA 1 disk and this disk is also the first start-up disk. If we take a loot at the device list as it is named in the BIOS, it is. 0 - DVD Drive (IDE 1-1) 1 - DVD Drive (IDE 1-2) 2 - Maxtor HD (IDE 2-1) 3 - Maxtor HD (IDE 2-2) 4 - Samsung HD (SATA 1) <– Contains Ubuntu 5 - Samsung HD (SATA 2) It seems that the installer installs grub on HD2 (in the right partition) but it placed the setup at HD0 and this is wrong, cause I set in the BIOS the system should start-up from device 4. So the devicelist is changed at boot time, cause then the Samsung HD with Linux is the first HD. So what I did to fix this, is started up a live cd and mounted the right partion, where grub was installed, in my case /dev/sdc1. Then I started grub.

sudo grub

Cause grub started at 0 while counting, the root is HD2,0 and the bootsector is also on HD2 !! cause, this is HD0 at boot time!

root (hd2,0) setup (hd2) quit

After this the computer reboots normally and Grub started loading Ubuntu.