Boot Mint 7 with mixed IDE,SATA (SOLVED)

[armagedon51]

This is my first with Mint and what a beautiful distro. I would like to make it my main OS.
But here's my little problem.
I have 3 disks, 1 IDE (20GB) and 2 SATA (2x80GB). No matter how I setup Mint, I can't get it to boot from my IDE HD.
Here's what I tried :
1- Desable the 2 satas in the bios. Install Mint on the IDE. No problem, boot fine and everything works.
2- Re-enable the 2 satas. Of course no more boot from the IDE. Bunch of errors, in summary "doesn't have /sbin/init". Ok must be the order of disks have screw up Grub.
3- Erase my IDE, leave all drives actives. Boot the Live cd, re-install Mint on the ide with no issue. (btw grub sees the first sata as /dev/sda). Reboot from HD no go, the PC says "no system disk found".
4- Restart the whole install but in the "advance setup", I select to put Grub on the IDE drive which is labelled /dev/sdc.
This time, the boot start ok but stop dead with Error 17 cannot mount selected partition.

I tried to go through all the help but I can't get it to boot. Anyone has an idea ? Thanks

grub devicemap file :
hd0 /dev/sda (sata 80gb)
hd1 /dev/sdb (sata 80gb)
hd2 /dev/sdc (ide 20 gb, my boot drive)

grub menu.lst:
....
root (hd2,0)
kernel /boot/blabla... root=/dev/sdc1 ro quiet
initrd /boot/blabla...
....

That seems alright but I'm hardly an expert. Btw, the Bios is always set to boot from the Ide.

[emorrp1]

Hello, and welcome to linux mint. Sounds like you have this problem: http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... annot_boot
Let me know if this doesn't work for you.

[armagedon51]

Thanks a lot emorrp1 for the help.

I went through the article and change the root pointer to use the UUID directly but I endup with the same error.
Error 17 cannot mount selected partition

I'm not sure what to do next. I'm pretty rusted in Linux and I'm not spending to much time on this. That's strange though because I use other distros before (Ubuntu, Fedora and other) none of them had a similar problem. It seems to be pretty basic stuff. Hopefully someone will have a problem like that and a solution.
TX

[armagedon51]

So here's a funny thing, I installed Ubuntu 9 on the same hard drive and it boot fine with all the drives on.
I compare the Grub files, while devicemap is the same, "menu.lst" is quite different from MINT.
Ubuntu use the UUID directly : main entry looks like this :

title Ubuntu ....
uuid 7xxxx-xxxx....
kernel /boot/vmlinux.... root=UUID=7xxx-xxxx ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img ......
quiet

There is one more line; UUID xxxx
I don't know if it's necessary but I'll retry Mint with that line.

[armagedon51]

First, sorry if I reply to my own post but I figure if it can help someone, that may be worthwhile.
So following Ubuntu example, I edit the grub "menu.lst" of Mint to use the UUID instead of /dev/ident (in my case "sdc1") for root. That did not works until I notice that line in MINT :
- root (hd2,0)

is replaced in UBUNTU by

- uuid uuid_disk_ident

So i did like zo in Mint :

title Linux Mint, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic
uuid db4dcb0c-02bd-4d2e-a4fa-deb420b3bfa0 (this is my boot disk /sdc1 ident given by the command "sudo blkid")
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=UUID=db4dcb0c-02bd-4d2e-a4fa-deb420b3bfa0 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic

Then it boot all right after that. So, far from being an expert, there may be a correction needed in the Wiki provided by my nice buddy emorrp1, I don't know, but I'm an happy dude now. I'm really in love with that Linux version. It's the closest Windows-user-friendly Linux distro I ever seen. Kudo for the brilliant people who did this.

That said, since my PC config is far from exotic, Mint should be able to do all that boot mombo itself. It's a "A" snag and I'm sure I can't be the only one with that problem.
Last Note: btw, in my case, if I let run the installation without specifying where to put the grub boot loader using the not so obvious "advanced" button, it use /hd0 witch ended up with nothing to boot from.