Hard drive swapping

[det4100]

I need a little help setting up drive bays on my system. Most of the computers I work on are older models with IDE hard drives. My first step in repairing these computers is backing up the clients data. In many cases, the computers are in such bad shape they will not boot or turn on, so I end up removing the drive, installing it in one of my sand box machines and recovering the data. I thought it would be a lot faster if I just purchased a drive bay and put the drive in there, instead of disassembling two computers. I know you can't hot swap IDE drives, but I'm having a problem getting Mint to boot when I install the extra drive. With no drive in the bay, it boots fine. With a drive in the bay, it will not boot. The mother board I'm using has one IDE channel and four SATA channels. The main drives are of course on the SATA channels, and the drive bay is connected to the IDE channel. At first I thought the problem was with the bios selecting IDE as the first boot device, but when I start the machine, Grub loads up and the menu comes up. (Grub is, of course, on the main SATA drive) However, when booting Mint, for some reason, it is looking for files on the IDE drive instead of the SATA drives. I'm not sure why the drives are being reassigned. I don't know if I should be looking at fstab or the grub menu. I temporarily solved the problem by booting into live cd's and then mounting the drives, but I would rather just have these drive either not mount at all until I mount them or mount as extra slave drives being assigned different drive locations that don't conflict with the SATA drives or the CDROM.

BTW my main drive for Mint is divided into separate partitions for Home, root, boot etc.

I hope I made myself clear. I don't want to boot the machine through the drive bays. I realize that this is what they are usually used for.

det4100

[Husse]

I read about half of your post before I understood that it is the problem described here you experience
Note that the main Mint site is bogged down tonight and please write a bit more spacious - it's much easier to read

[det4100]

Thank you Husse

I don't know why I didn't come across that link during my initial search.

det4100