GRUB on Dell PowerEdge: Problems with Promise SATA

[Catalin Patulea]

Hi,

I have been using GNU GRUB 0.97 to boot Ubuntu 7.04 from a SCSI disk.
GRUB is installed in the MBR of the disk. The disk has a /boot
partition at the beginning of the disk, it's ext3, no RAID or any
other funny business. I also have a Promise SATA150 TX2plus PCI card,
but there are no harddrives connected, and my system boots without any
problems.

A few days ago, I tried adding two SATA HDDs to the system and I can't
get my system to boot with them in (at least normally; I can still use
a Live CD to edit menu.lst and so on). This is what I see on bootup:
GRUB Loading stage1.5.

GRUB loading, please wait..
<hangs>

I tried writing stage1 and stage2 to a floppy (using dd, as
recommented in the manual) and booting from there. This is what
happens:
GRUB Loading stage2...<visible delay as GRUB loads stage2 from the floppy>....
GRUB Loading stage2...<visible delay as GRUB loads stage2 from the floppy>....
<repeats indefinitely>

Without the HDDs plugged in, GRUB boots from the floppy just fine. I
get a "grub>" prompt and I can see both my SCSI disks.

This is the extension BIOS for my SCSI controller that I see on bootup
after the main BIOS but before GRUB:
LSI Logic Corp. MPT BIOS
MPTBIOS-5.06.04

This is the extension BIOS for the SATA controller, seen just after
the SCSI BIOS:
SATA150 TX2plus BIOS Version 1.00.0.33

If the SATA HDDs aren't plugged in, the TX2plus BIOS says it "didn't
load" because there are no devices.

It seems to me that all this points to faulty TX2plus BIOS. I
recognize that this isn't the responsibility of the GRUB team.
However, I would appreciate any help in getting my system to boot :-)

Thanks in advance. Kindly Cc any replies directly to me, as I am not
subscribed to this list.

Catalin Patulea