Arch Linux

sfbi

Member

From: Bergen

Registered: 2008-03-13

Posts: 36

How to make arch bootable after shifting the hard drive?

I have two hard drives, each having an OS installed (Arch on sda, Win on sdb). I change the boot order in BIOS to switch between the OS's, and it works fine. Grub is installed in mbr.

But now I wanna change the connection of these two drives (Arch=>sdb, Win=>sda). After doing that, however, windows is still bootable, while Arch not any more.

I can sucessfully see Grub, but errors occur after that. I'm not sure what I should do to make Arch bootable. Can anyone give me some ideas?

violagirl23

Member

Registered: 2008-01-24

Posts: 184

Re: How to make arch bootable after shifting the hard drive?

Why don't you boot from an arch install CD and reinstall Grub and see what happens?

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sfbi

Member

From: Bergen

Registered: 2008-03-13

Posts: 36

Re: How to make arch bootable after shifting the hard drive?

Well, I haven't reinstall arch for a long time, not sure whether I can merely reinstall Grub without affecting the existing system. Moreover, Grub seems not the only stuff that needed to be reconfigured. I can exhaust all cases in "/boot/grub/menu.lst" instead.

Last edited by sfbi (2008-08-16 08:06:23)

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,604

Re: How to make arch bootable after shifting the hard drive?

If you're seeing grub, you don't need the install CD. Use the grub command line to boot your system, then reinstall grub as suggested.

fukawi2

Forum Moderator

From: .vic.au

Registered: 2007-09-28

Posts: 4,705

Website

Re: How to make arch bootable after shifting the hard drive?

If you can see Grub, then the system is reading it OK, but you'll need to boot the system and fix your /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab files to refer to hd(1) and sdb respectively.

To boot the system, you have 2 options:
1) When Grub shows up, press 'e' to edit the "ArchLinux" entry. Then press 'e' again to edit the 'root' line and then change hd(0,0) to hd(1,0)  (the second number might be different depending how your partition table is setup).  Then you can press 'b' to boot.
2) Use an install CD to boot, then mount your Arch partition and edit the files from there

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rooloo

Member

Registered: 2008-07-09

Posts: 218

Re: How to make arch bootable after shifting the hard drive?

I have two hard drives, each having an OS installed (Arch on sda, Win on sdb). I change the boot order in BIOS to switch between the OS's, and it works fine. Grub is installed in mbr.

if you change boot order in bios then grub will see the booting drive as hd0 no matter what. Why not post your menu.lst and fstab files.

what is the exact error you are getting, is it a grub error?

I do this setup and it works fine for me too, so I am not sure where you are going wrong.

sfbi

Member

From: Bergen

Registered: 2008-03-13

Posts: 36

Re: How to make arch bootable after shifting the hard drive?

Well, I think I have solved the problem. Fixing menu.lst and fstab (changing "sda" to "sdb") makes the system ok now. Thank you all.