[TriLUG] Serial ATA

[Joseph Tate]

Brian McCullough wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 16, 2004 at 11:30:12AM -0500, Joseph Tate wrote:
> 
>>Your new SATA drive is probably being recognized as /dev/hda and your 
>>old drive(s) have been moved to /dev/hdg or something.
> 
> 
> 
> That's certainly the type of symptom that I am seeing.
> 
> 
> 
>>What you've got is a bios "drive letter" problem.  The new SATA card has 
>>it's own bios that gets loaded I'm sure.  Within this bios you should be 
>>able to specify some kind of boot order.  If not, you'll need to boot 
>>with a rescue disk or similar to figure out what your new drive letters 
>>are and change /etc/fstab and /etc/grub.conf and possibly 
>>/boot/grub/device.map to use the displaced drives.
> 
> 
> 
> I guess what's confusing me is that the kernel is coming from the
> "original" boot drive, but during the start-up sequence the order seems
> to change.
> 
> I'll see what I can do to chase some of these thoughts, though.
> 
> Thanks,
> Brian
> 


Two different subsystems: grub boots the kernel from it's own mapping 
(referenced in /boot/grub/grub.conf as (hd0,0) or similar).  This 
addressing is different from kernel /dev/hdX mapping.  The problem is 
your root=/dev/hda1 line in grub.conf.  hda1 to the kernel is different 
than hd0,0 is to grub.  Why?  Probably because the MBR is on the same 
drive, so it doesn't get screwed up by bios drive letter displacement. 
If you knew which /dev/ entries were now occupied by your old drive, you 
could modify the boot line in grub directly.  If you want to do trial 
and error, try /dev/hd[c|g|e].

However, you should be able to just fix your bios configurations (Main 
and SATA) and not have to worry about this.  If bios tweaking doesn't 
seem to be solving the problem, check for newer bios versions, and 
failing that, make the changes I described above.