Partition disappears when changing OS via PLOP Floppy

[zoidberg]

split from this topic

the very same thing has just happened to one of my partitions, but under slightly different circumstances:

drives: one IDE, a couple of SATA on a PCI controller

plop used: bootable floppy

what i did: copied IDE's system partition to the second SATA drive, then tried to boot from it - didn't work; then disabled the IDE and made another try - didn't work again, but this time the partition on the second SATA simply disappeared without a trace; got curious and repeated the scenario described above - the result was totally identical.

[Elmar]

hi zoidberg,

the floppy version does not write anything to the hard disk when you do not configure it to write something.
what operating system do you try to boot?
when does the partition on the sata drive disappear? after you tried to boot the sata when the ide is connected, or when you try to boot the sata when the ide is not connected?

regards
elmar

[zoidberg]

hi Elmar,

i tried to boot XP; the partition disappeared when i tried to boot off the second SATA drive with the IDE drive disconnected (not physically though - just turned it off in bios).

[Elmar]

is the following correct?

you power on the pc and boot from floppy with the boot manager
the ide hd is disabled by the bios
you boot the sata hard disk when you press enter at "hda partition 1" in the boot manager

[zoidberg]

yes, that's correct, with the exeption that i have two sata hd's - one partition per each currently - and in the boot menu i had "hd-something 1" and "hd-something 2" options;
the one i tried to boot from was named "hd-something 2", and when i hit enter the process halted, after which i ctrl-alt-del'eted the pc, and after the pc rebooted the partition was gone.

[zoidberg]

As i mentioned, the scenario is repeatable (and the results, unfortunately, too). I'm not about to get into making conjectures as to what could possibly cause this, but, if that'll help, i can post something like a roster of drives and controllers involved or something.

[Elmar]

i need to know what "hd-something 2" was

[zoidberg]

you mean drive's make or the exact way it was named in the bootloader menu?

[Elmar]

the name in the menu

[zoidberg]

it was required because, given the nature of the MB and the PCI controller both SATA drives are connected to, it was impossible to boot off the second one - BIOS would pick only the first one.

i'll tell you the exact name a little bit later, ok?

[Elmar]

ok, however, xp is not able to boot from the second hard disk without a xp boot partition on the first hard disk (except with a trick and grub4dos). i know, this does not explain what happened, but the boot manager loads only the boot sector and then the boot sector continues the boot process. i have no idea why the partition data is cleared.

[zoidberg]

i know that, but since both sata's are each connected to their own channels (well, bit redundant to mention); and the problem is their controller's bios being unable to switch the boot sequence, i decided to give it a shot.

ok, with the ide one disabled, the menu looks the following way:
hda partition 2
hdb partition 1

the "disappearance" occurs upon trying to boot from the "hda partition 2"