[ltp] A ThinkPad mystery

[Richard Neill]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 
> Now for the mystery - the copy worked well,
> in fact too well.
> I couldn't find any way to _stop_ the machine
> booting from the new disk.
> I altered the boot order in the BIOS to boot from Hard Disk first,
> I mounted /dev/hda5 on /mnt and /dev/hda2 on /mnt/boot
> and ran
> 	grub-install --recheck --root-directory=/mnt /dev/hda
> 
> But whatever I did, I could not stop re-booting from the new disk.
> The only way I could stop it was by physically removing the disk,
> in which case it booted fine from /dev/hda .
> 

I think that sounds quite familiar. Consider a desktop PC with 2 HDDs 
and 2 CDROMS. (some permutation of hda,hdb,hdc,hdd - it doesn't matter).
I use exactly such a system on my desktop.

The BIOS will has 2 relevant menus:

  A)  Boot order:  (1)Floppy; (2)CD-ROM; (3)Hard disk.  (4)Network.

  B)  Which of the 2 CDROMS is to be preferred.
      Which of the 2 HDDs is to be preferred.


It sounds like your BIOS is smart enough to know that it has 2 HDDs, but 
not smart enough to give you the option of which one is preferred. (Or 
maybe you didn't find the menu in the right place.)

At any rate, the BIOS's concepts of  "Hard Disk" and "CD-ROM" really do 
mean HDD and CD. They aren't shorthand for "IDE0" and "IDE1".

Best wishes,

Richard