The Inferno

So, after the debacle with my last drive, I obtained a 320 GB Western Digital drive from my friend Juan, who kindly gave it to me gratis. I installed it and proceeded to restore my system. Two issues were foremost:

1. My Linux /boot partition was on the drive that died, on /dev/sda4. This was easy to fix, I simply booted into a livecd, edited my /etc/fstab to remove the /boot entry, and copied my existing kernel from /usr/src/linux into the /boot folder on my / partition. I had to reinstall GRUB as well, and add the Linux entry.

2. Re-installing Windows Server 2003. This was nowhere near as straightforward as installing it for the first time, when I had only one SATA drive. The Windows installer would see all three SATA drives, and let me create a partition on the new drive, but on the next step complain:

This disk does not contain a Windows-compatible partition

This baffled me, but I thought that the installer might be quibbling over the MBR, since the drive had previous held a ReiserFS-based Gentoo root partition. I booted into Linux and wiped the disk clean with qtparted and then retried Windows setup. This didn’t work either, to my frustration. Finally, after Googling some more, a random forum post suggested disconnecting the other SATA drives, since apparently Windows can’t handle more than one SATA drive during the install. Rather than physically disconnect the other two drives, I simply disabled them in the BIOS, and this time Windows installed properly.

To recapitulate, I have three drives:

/dev/sda – My / ext3 partition

/dev/sdb – My Windows NTFS partition

/dev/sdc – My ext3 storage drive

I finished the install and then re-enabled the Linux drives and added the Windows boot entry to GRUB. Surprise, surprise, more issues here. Windows doesn’t like booting from a SATA slave (sdb1), so I had to resort to the following trickery in my GRUB config file.

title Windows Server 2003
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive

Now Windows believes it’s booting off the first drive on the SATA bus and life is good again. Both my OSes work and hopefully, nothing goes down anytime soon.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 11:31 pm and is filed under disk failure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.