MBR To 2nd Drive

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: John Moniz <john.moniz-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org>

| I'd like to help out a friend of mine with a drive mishap. He has a PC with
| two hard drives, Windows of some sort on the primary master, Red Had (maybe
| Fedora?) on the primary slave. He uses Grub as a boot loader. There is no
| floppy drive on this machine, so he never made a boot disk, but he does have
| access to a Knoppix CD.
| 
| His master drive died. He would like to make his linux drive the master for
| the moment. What can he do to have the MBR set up in the linux drive? I would
| suspect that it takes more than just changing the grub configuration.

Grub surely went away with the first drive.

I have a grub boot CD.  You can too.  I think these are the
instructions:
  http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/Making-a-GRUB-bootable-CD-ROM.html

It can load the existing Linux from the second HD.  (This might be
possible with grub on a USB flash memory, depending on the BIOS, but I
haven't tried that.)

The BIOS may allow you to boot from the second drive.  I don't think
that that is a common feature.  If you can, then, once you have booted
Linux (using the grub CD), you can run grub-install to install grub on the
MBR of the second drive.

Now to answer your actual question, building on the above.  If you
boot the existing linux partition but with the drive moved from
/dev/hdb to /dev/hda, several things will go wrong.  So you need to
fix them with, say, a knoppix live CD first:

- the boot loader will be confused or not exist

- the kernel will be confused (fix /boot/grub/grub.conf)

- /etc/fstab will be wrong

There may be other things that I've forgotten.
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