unexpected grub breakage

[Doug Hunley]

Yes, I realize there is a *lot* of redundancy in that subject ;)

I'm running Grub legacy (1.x) and it worked perfectly until yesterday.
For the longest time now, I've had four WD SATA drives in my
workstation. They are split into a 100Mb RAID1 and a RAID5 taking up
all the rest of the space. Grub's /boot partition is on the RAID1,
while / is on the RAID5. Like I said it all works fine.

However, I bought a Highpoint PCI-X RAID controller, stuck it into the
system and cabled it to an external SATA enclosure, and Grub breaks. I
reboot, the BIOS sees the new controller, the controller sees the new
drives I've attached, and then I see 'Loading Grub' and then 'Loading
Grub state 1.5' comes up and that's where it stops. Just completely
sits there and does NOTHING.

I discovered that if I kill the power to the external enclosure,
everything boots normally. My BIOS sees the controller, the controller
sees that there are *no* drives attached to it, and Grub boots off the
RAID1 without issue and loads my system off the RAID5.

Anyone have any idea why in the hell Grub would hang when the external
drives are present?

* All RAID above is "md" or "software" RAID

-- 
Douglas J Hunley (doug.hunley at gmail.com)
Twitter: @hunleyd                                               Web:
douglasjhunley.com
G+: http://goo.gl/sajR3