On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 12:39 AM, Zhang Weiwu <[email protected]> wrote: > grub> root (hd1 > > Result: nothing. In fact, if I do tab-completion at > grub> root (hd > > without typing '1', it autocompletes to hd0, meaning grub2 consider only one > hdd in existance.
The standard way to list devices at the grub shell is to simply run "ls". > > My question: > > Is it by design some laptops won't let grub2 boot from eSATA - a dead-end, > or merely a configuration issue? The laptop is Toshiba Portégé R600 with > very limited BIOS options (no config option about eSATA at all and harddisk > does not show up in BOIS once installed or connected). By default grub accesses disks through your boot firmware's interfaces rather than directly, what this means is that (by default) grub can only access the disks that your BIOS can access. GRUB does have native drivers for some types of hardware but 1: I don't think (though I have not checked) that eSATA is among the supported hardware interfaces. 2: If using grub's native drivers you cannot chainload, and it is only possible to boot Windows by chainloading its bootoader. and 3: Even if you were able to chainload Windows' bootloader, and had proper int13 hooks to allow Windows' bootloader to access your eSATA disk, Windows itself would still need to support booting via eSATA (I don't know what is involved in setting this up for Windows). So it can't easily be done, but you do have some options that *may* work. 1: Find a boot manager that can add support for additional hardware types via int13 hooks, like Plop, but with eSATA support (as far as I can tell, Plop does *not* have eSATA support). I don't know if such a boot manager even exists. 2: Keep just your (very small) Windows "System" partition on your SSD, while leaving the Windows "Boot" partition on the eSATA drive. Note that Microsoft's terminology is opposite of what you probably expect for "System" and "Boot", see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_partition_and_boot_partition . I don't know if Windows allows the System and Boot partitions to be on different drives, and you still need to configure Windows properly to boot via eSATA. Accomplishing this is likely not straightforward. Just copying the file contents of the System partition to another ntfs filesystem in a partition on your SSD certainly won't work. Using dd or GParted to copy the partition's contents to a partition on your SSD probably won't either. You'll need to ask Windows support for instructions on how to accomplish this, if it's possible at all. The good news is that once Windows is configured properly, all you have to do from grub's side is re-run update-grub or "grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg". Good luck. -- Jordan Uggla (Jordan_U on irc.freenode.net) _______________________________________________ Help-grub mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-grub
