Linux Mint Forums

I have been using Mint 5 together with Debian and XP in a multiple boot setup for some time with few problems. When the final version of Mint 6 was available I thought it was time to give that a go. Unfortunately since my last install I had bought and installed a SATA drive thinking to give room for trying alternative distros. So I attempted to install Mint 6 to the SATA drive leaving Mint 5, XP and Debian on the other two original IDE drives.

Big problems then transpired which after research I discover are not new and not specific to Mint. Grub, the BIOS and QParted do not agree on the partition/drive naming. Some of the problems I incurred may have been due to finger trouble as the install was done partly as therapy after a dose of the flu/lurgi which has struck England this Christmas but I have installed many distros without these problems before. What's more the Mint6 installation did not end up on the nice nearly empty SATA drive but overwrote a partition on which I kept lots of my downloaded applications which didn't need to go on C:. And Grub produced all sorts of errors.

Now all of this is correctable from backups and redownloads but it would have been nice to have been warned about the perils of mixed drives. Do you think a warning could be included in a later version? Or was it included and I just missed it? If so my apologies. The best solution, of course, would be a fix which must be becoming more urgent given the inevitable increase in mixed IDE/SATA systems.
Tony

Does this help
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... annot_boot
have not had time to read your post - just the headline

Yes, I had read that in my research after the troublesome install. It discusses the problem but doesn't really indicate what will be done in the future to get over it now that mixed IDE SATA systems are more common. It may be that more text warnings or guidance is needed during the installation process. I have managed to get my system running again with judicious use of menu.lst editing and BIOS boot preference but I find the Mint 6 install not on the SATA drive that I intended but on one of the IDE drives where it overwrote existing useful Windows applications. This could be my error but I seriously doubt it - I am and was this time, always very careful in selecting the destination drive and this has never happened to me before. I have a working Mint 6 install now and I will play with it but this has rather soured the Mint experience for me.
Tony

I have a similar problem when install Linux.
I have one onbord IDE controller with the main HDD and a DVD
on top I have a IDE RAID controller with 4 HDD and 2 firewire disk

So it live GRUB and Linux tolal confuse and mount then i random order.

When i make a update/clean install I disconnect all disk only live the one on the onbord controller,

then I edit the grub menu.list and FSTAB with UUID and the it's works...

Thanks for your comments, dizmoduck and apologies to all for my duplicate posting. It does seem that the most reliable installation method with mixed drives is to unplug the IDEs, install to SATA (if that is your intention) and replug the IDEs. You may still need to edit menu.lst but at least you won't overwrite stuff you need. Perhaps a suggestion to this effect could be included in the install scripts.
Tony

tonyapp I'm sorry that things did not turn out quite well for you. This is generally a minor "bug" and gets even more minor as IDE is becoming more and more obsolete.
It cannot happen with only SATA disks (unless of course if you move around the connector )
I have not heard of lost data because of this before (but because of other problems...)
This emphasises one of the "bad sides" of Linux - that you have to install it, it does not come preinstalled.
I deleted your double post - it's we that should apologise this happens a lot now due to all the 500 Internal server errors we get in the forum - so far we have not found the reason for them