Adding slave HDD causes system to load from wrong HDD

[red_lego_man]

Here is wat I've done: I had two HDDs in my fedora core 4 system, hda and hdd.
I wanted to install FC5 so I swapped hdd to hda (IDE Primary master), and removed the old hda.
I installed FC5, formatted the drive etc, etc, ended up with fresh install of FC5 (not using LVM).

I was happy, and wanted to access to config files etc that were on the old hda, so I connected that drive as IDE Secondary Slave (hdd) and powered up. This is where the problems start.
When the system comes up, it get the grub menu from the new hda(FC5), but them it seems to want to load everything from the old hda (now hdd). So the system tries to look for the kernel on the slave drive, is reading fstab on the slave drive, it even says FC4 (FOUR!) on screen, and fails to boot.

If I power off and remove hdd, everything is fine a dandy.

I tried booting into rescue mode and removing partiton1 from the slave drive, to no avail.
I tried putting the slave drive in all the other IDE posistins (Primamry slave, secondary master, secondary slave) to no avail.

What the heck's going on?

[taurus]

I don't know why you would switch harddrives just to install FC5! I suppose you have Windows on the first harddrive, master drive, and want to install FC5 on the second harddrive, slave drive. Just connect both the way it is right now and when you get to the partition section, tell it to install on the second harddrive. That's all there is to it. Don't forget to install GRUB on MBR so you can boot both FC5 and Windows.

[red_lego_man]

I don't know why you would switch harddrives just to install FC5! I suppose you have Windows on the first harddrive, master drive, and want to install FC5 on the second harddrive, slave drive. Just connect both the way it is right now and when you get to the partition section, tell it to install on the second harddrive. That's all there is to it. Don't forget to install GRUB on MBR so you can boot both FC5 and Windows.


I did it (and it's done) just simply to save my FC4 installation. It had been upgraded from Redhat 8, so I thought it was time for a fresh install, so I did it on a clean disk. Windows is not involved anywhere, anyhow, never was.
It does not explain why when I attach an old bootable disk that the FC5 installation tries to use it instead of the FC5 stuff.

Like I said, one HD with FC5, boots beautifully, add the second HD and it screws things up.

[red_lego_man]

Imagine it this way instead:
I took a PC with one HD installed as IDE primary master, installed FC5, and all runs fine.
I take another HD from another identical PC, running FC4, again the only drive as IDE primary slave, and attach it to the first PC as the secondary slave (or any other position in the IDE chains), and the FC5 grub loads, but then things start screwing up as it is looking on the slave disk for the kernel, rc scripts etc.
I don't understand why it would do this. Surely it should boot from and load everything from the primary master, and ignore the secondary slave, especially as their are no fstab entries for it, and grub.conf only mentions (hd0,0) and /dev/hda.