Switching motherboard: troubleshooting?

[robert at laferla.net (Robert La Ferla)]

New motherboard?  Have you looked at the BIOS settings?  Check the IDE 
controller settings and geometry.

Rich Braun wrote:

>I'm trying to overhaul a server and have run into a weird boot problem.  Can't
>readily find the solution online--other than suggestions that perhaps I should
>switch to another distro, but I don't want to give up quite yet because I
>spent a lot of time on this installation.
>
>Basically I bought a new hard drive, downloaded SUSE 10.0 from the gatech
>site, and used my desktop PC's motherboard to get everything loaded and
>configured.
>
>Then I tried plugging the hard drive (actually, two drives, RAID1) into my
>file server's motherboard.  No luck:  I get "Waiting for device /dev/hda2 to
>appear" and it gives up trying to mount the root fs, dumping me into a
>primitive shell.  The IDE interface doesn't show up in /proc/devices.
>
>SUSE's rescue CD is quite useless.  Amazingly so, in fact:  it doesn't even
>have a copy of fdisk!  If you try running the installation diagnostic, it
>fails to recognize a root fs in anything other than a top-level partition
>(forget RAID, forget lvm).
>
>However one quirk about the rescue CD is this:  if I boot it up in rescue
>mode, the kernel will recognize my IDE bus and I can manually mount the
>filesystems.  So far as I can tell, it's the *same* 2.6 kernel image as the
>one previously installed on the hard drive.
>
>I'm stumped, after tinkering a lot with command lines to GRUB.  Where might I
>turn to come up with ideas, other than to trash this setup and switch to Red
>Hat?  The file-server's motherboard has an old BIOS but I have no reason to
>believe this is the problem.
>
>-rich
>  
>