Dell Laptop Switcheroo

What's the Problem
On some Dell laptops (mainly the silvery grey ones), the cdrom and hard drive are switched (cd is on IDE1, hard drive on IDE2). This will cause a preloaded hard drive to fail to boot. A telltale sign of this is the system hanging up at 'Mounting Root File System'.

How do I Fix It?
This will take a few steps; editing GRUB once to boot the system once, editing '/etc/fstab' to be able to mount the boot partition, and editing '/boot/grub/menu.lst'.

Editing GRUB (One Time Edit)
To get the system to boot once, we need to edit a line in GRUB. At 'GRUB loading', hit esc. to pause GRUB. The top line should be highlighted. Hit 'e' to edit this line. On the next screen you will see more lines. Arrow down to the second line and hit 'e' again. The next screen will be a simple editor. Cursor over to the part that says "root=/dev/hda1" and change it to "root=/dev/hdc1". hit 'enter' then 'b' to boot the modified command list. This will fix the problem once.

Editing Fstab
Open a terminal. Using your favorite editor, open /etc/fstab. I will use nano.

code:

oem@freekbox:~$nano /etc/fstab GNU nano 2.0.2             File: /etc/fstab # proc           /proc           proc    defaults        0       0 /dev/hda2      /               ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0       1 /dev/hda1      none            swap    sw              0       0 /dev/hdd       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0 /dev/fd0       /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto  0       0 [ Read 8 lines ] ^G Get Help ^O WriteOut  ^R Read File ^Y Prev Page ^K Cut Text  ^C Cur Pos ^X Exit     ^J Justify   ^W Where Is  ^V Next Page ^U UnCut Text^T To Spell
 * 1) /etc/fstab: static file system information.

Here change all instances of 'hda' to 'hdc'. Save and exit.