Ubuntu 7.10 experience and some storage devices mapping
Scribbled on Friday, November 9th, 2007So now finally am settled with my XP clean(was it?) install and now installed Gutsy Gibbon after one month of its release.
Surely I am impressed by the whole lot of goodies and its hardware compatibility. No need to pop in your motherboard cd in drive bay to install drivers, all are included in Gutsy Gibbon well before.
Though installing linux can be dangerous but only for those who are dumb enough to understand basic hardware/software knowledge. Believe me it was more easy to install Gutsy Gibbon than Win-XP.
Though few things you have to keep in mind. Remember on which HDD MBR you are installing Grub coz that can lead to direct Win-XP boot without Grub getting in the way to provide you with options of selecting either OS.
Its like when you boot from Ubuntu 7.10 live cd, just run few commands to check which HDD is getting Grub by default.
1) open a terminal
Application > Accessories > Terminal
2) Now run this command
sudo fdisk -l
remember thats lowercase L and not 1.
3) See the out put, it will be something like this, the partition displayed are not in order, though u can visualize their order by linking START and END.
Output:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 61 489951 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 62 19457 155798370 f W95 Ext’d (LBA)
/dev/sda5 1850 19457 141436228+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 62 1593 12305727 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 1594 1849 2056288+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
As you can see first partition(sda1) start at 1 and ends at 61 then next partition starts at 62 and ends at 19457 (sda5). So these are not displayed in arrangement…huh.
W95 Ext’d (LBA) signifies the extended partition and it covers the whole length of the logical partitions inside it, Partition sda5,sda6,sda7 are all inside this single extended(sda2) partition.
4) sda1 is hard disk 1, partition 1, where “sda = Hard disk 1″ and “1 = Partition 1″
Its like
sda1 = HDD 1, Partition 1
sda2 = HDD 1, Partition 2
sdb1 = HDD 2, Partition 1
sdb3 = HDD2, Partition 3
sdc1 = HDD3, Partition 1
NOTE: you may get hda1,hda2 instead of sda1,sda2…its coz those drives are IDE and not SATA/SCSI
sda1,sda2,hda1,hda2… are the mount points for any storage device like hard disk, pen drive that are created to access those drives.
But Grub sees drives as hd0 or hd0,0 for first HDD and first partition, hd0,1 is first HDD and second partition, hd1 or hd1,0 is second HDD and first partition.
It will be hd0, that means hard-disk 1 and partition 1(remember counting starts from 0 for Grub). You could have written (hd0,0) to imply Hard Disk 1,Partiton 1.
Its like
hd0 or hd0,0 = HDD 1, Partition 1
hd0,1 = HDD 1, Partition 2
hd1 or hd1,0 = HDD 2, Partition 1
hd1,3 = HDD 2, Partition 4
5) So its like the first device which is found will be mapped to sda and the n next to sdb and so on.
6) By default Primary Master IDE is the hd0 for Grub and then Primary Slave IDE is hd1.
SATA drives gets last preference and will be numbered according to their port, like STAT disk connected to SATA port 1 is assigned first and then the other connected to SATA 2 and so on.
7) Do run these commands at terminal and get get some deeper understanding:
cat /boot/grub/menu.lst
This will give the configuration file for boot menu provided by Grub. It is the ideal place to see and change HDD mapping.
cat /boot/grub/device.map
This will show mapping of mount points to grub hd.
Thats enough for now 
Till then listen to the most adoring song(though lyrics may seem explicit but I love this song):
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo1asOnf_sk
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