Grub confusion

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 6:56 AM, Jim Byrnes <jf_byrnes at comcast.net> wrote:
> On 12/09/2013 09:27 PM, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
>>
>> Running xubuntu 13.04, I have 4 large hard drives on the machine, some
>> of which have been used before as boot drives.
>>
>> The BIOS tries to use the first one that it can access that also
>> contains a bootstrap loader.  I would like to remove the loaders, but
>> maintain the partition table in all drives but one.
>>
>> Is there a handy way to do this?
>>
>
> Does your bios/efi maybe allow you to specify the hard drive to boot from?
> Mine does and it made swapping out a HD with Ubuntu on it for one with Win 7
> and still boot from a remaining HD with a different copy of Ubuntu on it.
>
> Regards,  Jim

All drives are MBR formatted.

I described the situation poorly, reflecting the fact that I'm both
frustrated and confused.  The 4 drives are the same make and model, so
the BIOS can't tell me which one is which.  The mobo has 6 internal
SATA-3 connectors, in a group of 2 and another group of 4, with no
obvious order.  When I run update-grub, then boot, the grub bootloader
has a peculiar idea of what kernels there are, that does not entirely
agree with what's in /boot.  I can boot, but I have to choose the
kernel carefully.

This is surely partly a result of the fact that some of those other
disks still have a Linux image of some kind, almost surely including a
viable grub boot loader, and some of this shows in the options when
booting.

So I'm not sure what drive the boot loader is on.  I'm not sure what
/boot it's using, so I'm not sure which /boot/grub/menu.cfg it's
using.

I want to simplify the situation, at least a bit.  But I do not want
to lose those other Linux boot options, although I can do without
their bootloaders and config files -- if only I knew which was which.

Since I don't know exactly what's happening, I'm leery of destroying
stuff for fear the system won't boot.  I'm pretty sure that the drive
that became /dev/sda is the one the BIOS booted from, but I suspect
that its notion of /boot is different from mine, and it's not being
updated by update-grub.

Waiting for clarity and inspiration........

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman

programmer, n. an organism that transmutes caffeine into software.
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