Urgent help please[Solved]

[Sleepy]

It sounds like you are in a pickle. It seems like you have grub installed on one drive and Linux installed on another.

Lol Tex  
Anyway I got some good news and some bad news.
The good news is, I have the grub menu back.Sorry to have wasted peoples time again.The reason for that is,in the bios settings I found 'Boot device priority'that I had changed.Then I found'Hard disk drive'which I hadn't changed and now have.

The bad news is and I suspected this earlier.I can select any of the PCLinuxOS from the list and not one of them will load past the graphic boot screen.They just stop dead.
So how on earth can I get into them now to alter what has to be altered?

So they were in the wrong order, after all! That is good news, glad you at least got that far!
As for the issues currently, probably due to changed hardware. Try to see if you can't get the boot up process in verbose mode to catch any errors. Apart from that, this I know nothing about, so I will get some sleep instead. I hope somebody will be by to help you out!

Cheers!
CJ

Much obliged to you CJ,You were right all along about the boot order 
Dunno what I'm gonna do about the next problem but maybe someone will.
I'm also off to bed,it's 1.30am on this hot rock in the Atlantic and still 27c......

[Old-Polack]

It sounds like you are in a pickle. It seems like you have grub installed on one drive and Linux installed on another.

Lol Tex  
Anyway I got some good news and some bad news.
The good news is, I have the grub menu back.Sorry to have wasted peoples time again.The reason for that is,in the bios settings I found 'Boot device priority'that I had changed.Then I found'Hard disk drive'which I hadn't changed and now have.

The bad news is and I suspected this earlier.I can select any of the PCLinuxOS from the list and not one of them will load past the graphic boot screen.They just stop dead.
So how on earth can I get into them now to alter what has to be altered?

Press the Esc key and see where and when they stop.

[Sleepy]

It sounds like you are in a pickle. It seems like you have grub installed on one drive and Linux installed on another.

Lol Tex  
Anyway I got some good news and some bad news.
The good news is, I have the grub menu back.Sorry to have wasted peoples time again.The reason for that is,in the bios settings I found 'Boot device priority'that I had changed.Then I found'Hard disk drive'which I hadn't changed and now have.

The bad news is and I suspected this earlier.I can select any of the PCLinuxOS from the list and not one of them will load past the graphic boot screen.They just stop dead.
So how on earth can I get into them now to alter what has to be altered?

Press the Esc key and see where and when they stop.

Thanks O-P
It gets more complicated now.
I pressed ESC to see what occurs and what I get on whichever I decide to boot to on sda drive is 'Waiting for device **** to appear(timeout 1 min)'.
Now, if I wait for a while(considerably longer than before changing the main board) it now boots up ok.
The odd thing is,I've checked fdisk -l and my other HDD sdb doesn't show up which explains why the two systems ZenMini and LXDE 2007 wont boot at all.
Tried unplugging the drive several times but it doesn't seem to make any difference.However,surely it must be detected as it shows in the bios settings?

[kjpetrie]

This usually means it can't find your swap partition to check whether it needs to resume from a suspension to disc. Use the blkid command to check your UUIDs and ensure they match those in the resume option in menu.lst (and also /etc/fstab in each system).

[Sleepy]

This usually means it can't find your swap partition to check whether it needs to resume from a suspension to disc. Use the blkid command to check your UUIDs and ensure they match those in the resume option in menu.lst (and also /etc/fstab in each system).

From what I can see,it all looks ok.
What is puzzling is,if I boot into a live disc,I can see both disc drives from fdisk -l but booting into a system it only shows one.
Should i be seeing a boot flag * on both drives or is there something wrong here?

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        7127    57247596   83  Linux
/dev/sda2            7128        7663     4305420   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3            7664        9729    16595145    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            7664        7919     2056288+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6            7920        9729    14538793+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x44cb44cb

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1       16708   134206978+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2           16709       30401   109989022+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sdb5           16709       18035    10659096   83  Linux
/dev/sdb6           18152       18175      192748+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb7           18176       18276      811251   83  Linux
/dev/sdb8           18277       18785     4088511   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb9           18786       22946    33423201   83  Linux
/dev/sdb10          22947       27135    33648111   83  Linux
/dev/sdb11          27136       30401    26234113+  83  Linux

[Old-Polack]

Sleepy:

Boot flags are a Windows thing, but don't hurt or help with Linux. They are just ignored. You can toggle them off with the a command from fdisk, if the one on the Linux partition sda1 bothers you.

If only one drive is seen from the running OS, that usually indicates different controllers, where the driver module for one is loaded, but the driver for the other is not. If the same module runs both controllers, both drives should be seen.

[Sleepy]

I'm beginning to think it may be easier to lose this troublesome 80Gb IDE drive and install Zen  to the other dive.
Strange also that I cant now boot the Zen live disc either.

[Sleepy]

I'm in need of some more help please.
Following on from the above post,I have now removed one HDD which leaves me with just one.
I installed removed one distro and added Zenmini this morning and added the grub to the same partition which should be on /dev/sda9.
Ive tried several combination's but am unable to see any grub boot screen and once again it boots directly into XP.
Can anyone explain where I'm going wrong?Is it maybe because there are too many partitions on the one drive?

Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x44cb44cb

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1       16708   134206978+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2           16709       30401   109989022+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5           16709       18035    10659096   83  Linux
/dev/sda6           18152       18175      192748+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7           18176       18276      811251   83  Linux
/dev/sda8           18277       18785     4088511   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda9           18786       22946    33423201   83  Linux
/dev/sda10          22947       27135    33648111   83  Linux
/dev/sda11          27136       30401    26234113+  83  Linux

[CJ]

You would have to redo the MBR on that disc, as it appears to still hold the XP MBR boot loader. At least this is easy.

Cheers!
CJ

[kjpetrie]

When you redo the MBR or install Grub, you have to install it to /dev/sda (without the number) or (hd0) (without the comma and second number).

menu.lst goes on one of the partitions and GRUB needs to know where to find it, but GRUB itself goes on the MBR of the drive.

[Sleepy]

Finally getting things to work now.
Every system was virtually aided useless,with graphics /sounds problems and a lot of the internals incompatible with the new main board.Even the cd/dvd drive doesn't read certain discs as it did before(even after a clean) and it was lucky I had a usb job to hand.
I'm having to do a full reinstall of all OS's, as the ones which do load,take several arduous minutes.I reinstalled Zen which wouldn't boot at all and it's now back at maximum speed.
So,unless your forced to change a Motherboard,don't go there as it's quite likely the same may happen.

Thanks to all for the helpful tips 

[longtom]

Finally getting things to work now.
Every system was virtually aided useless,with graphics /sounds problems and a lot of the internals incompatible with the new main board.Even the cd/dvd drive doesn't read certain discs as it did before(even after a clean) and it was lucky I had a usb job to hand.
I'm having to do a full reinstall of all OS's, as the ones which do load,take several arduous minutes.I reinstalled Zen which wouldn't boot at all and it's now back at maximum speed.
So,unless your forced to change a Motherboard,don't go there as it's quite likely the same may happen.

Thanks to all for the helpful tips 

I would imagine that changing a mb to a different one, especially when you use it's onboard sound and video facilities, will have an impact on any os installed on the hdd.  All the drivers are wrong ...

Luckily it's not something I do on a regular basis ... 

[CJ]

I would imagine that changing a mb to a different one, especially when you use it's onboard sound and video facilities, will have an impact on any os installed on the hdd.  All the drivers are wrong ...

That makes sense. I did it once myself, with no averse effects, except the onboard sound. (It didn't have onboard video.) I stuck in audio card and to this day I actually do not know whether it was a driver issue or a fault on the mobo itself.

Cheers!
CJ