#2 AiR-BOOT 1.06 installed itself on "wrong" disk

[Bert Goff]

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION:
AiR-BOOT 1.06 installed itself on "wrong" disk
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MY HARDWARE SETUP:
System: Compaq Presario SR5710F w/ AMD Athlon X2 4450e 2.3 GHz (dual processor)
Motherboard: Compaq MCP61PM-HM (Iris8-GL6) made by ECS as model MCP61-PM-HM
has 2 Serial-ATA (SATA) connectors and 1 paralell-ATA (PATA) connector
devices: - 500 GB Hitachi 7200 rpm HDS72105 on SATA
- CD/DVD-ROM on SATA
- 60 GB Maxtor D740X-6L on PATA
BIOS - Phoenix AWARD BIOS rev 5.27 6/10/08
BIOS set to boot from 500 GB Hitachi SATA disk
Note that DFSEE 10.5 reports the PATA disk as Disk 1 and the SATA disk as Disk 2
Partitions:
SATA disk: about 20 partitions, including eComstation 2.0GA, Windows Vista, Ubuntu, various data partitions, various test bootable partitions
PATA disk: no primary partitions, just 1 extened partition with 3 logical partitions (FAT32, HPFS, NTFS)
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MY ACTIONS LEADING TO PROBLEM:
I had just finished installing a fresh eComStation 2.0GA to the 1st logical partition on the SATA drive. While doing this, the IBM Boot Manager was setup and took over the MBR.
On reboot, the Boot Manager was booted and It displayed it's options.
I then re-installed Air-BOOT 1.06
Messages:
said AiR-BOOT was missing from MBR, but it's configuration information was OK. [as I expected]
some kind of warning message(s) about a possible virus [due to above, as I expected]
then:
"Air-BOOT detected that the virus has broken your partition-table. Sadly the virus also broke Air-BOOT's backup. Your will have to help yourself."
I replied "A" and Air-BOOT was reinstalled.
I rebooted and the system directly booted Windows Vivta which is on the first primary partition on the SATA drive.
This was NOT the expected result.
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MY ACTIONS TO ANALYSE THE PROBLEM AND RECOVER:
I ran DFSEE 10.5 to see what it might tell me. It reported:
- MBR for the SATA disk had the IBM OS/2 LVM, 14.105 signiture
- MBR for the PATA disk had the AiR-BOOT signiture
- All partitions on the SATA drive were as expected
- NO PARTITIONS (at all) on the PATA drive
I remove the PATA drive and reinstalled AiR-BOOT
System booted into Air-BOOT, as expected, showing all the bootable partitions on the SATA drive. Good news!
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MY CONCLUSIONS:
When I first tried to reinstall Air-BOOT, the Air-BOOT installation program must have been looking at the MBR track on the PATA disk. This disk had previously been my main disk on another system and at sometime, had Air-BOOT on it.
So, the reinstall actually put AiR-BOOT onto the PATA drive.
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PUZZLES:
1) Windows Vista booted directly after the first AiR-BOOT re-install attempt. On boot just prior to reinstalling AiR-BOOT, the IBM Boot Manager was loaded.
But it looks like Air-Boot only touched the PATA disk. Or not?
2) The partitions on the PATA drive disappeared. Since I did not verify them in any way after the eComStation install, maybe that messed them up some how? But, could the Air-BOOT reinstall write more than expected, since in may have been looking at 2 disks, not just one.
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MY SUGGESTIONS:
1) If Air-Boot installation program finds more than one disk, prompt the user for where to install.
2) Review code to see if either of my 2 "Puzzles" could somehow relate to Air-Boot install when multiple disks are present.

[M. Kiewitz]

How did you install AiR-BOOT? Via Floppy? Via CD? Via installer under an OS? In the latter case, which OS?

Under OS/2 AiR-BOOT installer will check harddrive 1 (1st harddrive from OS/2 perspective). If OS/2 detects the harddrives in a different order than BIOS, then such "mismatch" could happen.

[Bert Goff]

I was trying to install AiR-BOOT from a CD. I created the CD from the AiR-BOOT distribution file "CD-ROM/airboot.iso"

In the case of the OS/2 installer, I would recommend at least a user prompt to confirm the planned disk for the installation.

Any ideas about my lost partition table contents?

[M. Kiewitz]

I would need to check to be sure.
Did you get some question about restoring your MBR? If you just reinstalled AiR-BOOT, I don't see any real possibility of it deleting the partitions in there.

Also AiR-BOOT saves a backup of your MBR to sector 60 of track 0 every boot. If you booted from that harddrive before, it should be there. Also normally it's possible to recalculate the partitions manually.