>> *Why* is this system's initial boot code apparently
>> agreeing to boot from my IDE disk (wd0), then sneakily booting from my
>> SCSI disk (sd0)???

Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr> suggests:
> 
> wd0, wd1, wd2 ... and sd0, sd1, sd2, ...  are only aliases to really what
> matters to the boot code: hd0, hd1, hd2, ... (which are also called
> C,D,E,... by the BIOS).

Ah; this is no doubt related to the boot prompt's message about using hd1
to boot SCSI when both IDE and SCSI are available -- which is something
I had not had to do (sd0 and hd0 seemed to access my first SCSI disk).
I'd been wondering what that was all about.

> The boot code uses the BIOS to load the kernel, and so doesn't know if the
> disk is IDE or SCSI. All it knows is "disk 0", "disk 1", etc ...
> So saying wd0 or sd0 at the boot prompt both points to hd0, the first
> BIOS disk.

How would I find out which disks the BIOS has assigned to which
numbers?

> I don't know what number your IDE disk is,

I put it as "primary master", if that helps.  I'll look at the BIOS
start-up messages more closely and see if any drive letters are
mentioned.

> or even if the bios can boot from
> it at all when the SCSI bios has priority (the "boot IDE/SCSI fist" option
> in some PC), it depends on your SCSI bios and on your setup.

I think my BIOS has a "boot IDE/SCSI fist" setting; presumably, I
would have set it to SCSI; I'll check it.

> Check what you SCSI bios say about disks, it should assign C to the fisrt
> bootable disk, D to the second, etc ...
> You may  be able to tweak the SCSI bios so that it assigns only one bootable
> disk, so that D (or hd1) gets assigned to your IDE disk.

I will read my motherboard manual and see what I can find in this
respect.  I believe you have pointed me in the right direction, and I
am no longer in danger of going insane.  Many thanks!


Anne.
-- 
Ms. Anne Bennett, Senior Analyst, IITS, Concordia University, Montreal H3G 1M8
anne@alcor.concordia.ca                                        +1 514 848-7606