On Wed, 3 Oct 2007, Alfredo Ferrari wrote:
Hi
I have the following problem:
a) a laptop with a SATA drive
b) a modular bay in the same laptop where I can fit a DVD, a battery
or a PATA drive
If the PATA drive is there Fedora 7 recognizes it as /dev/sda and the
SATA one as /dev/sdb. Without the PATA one, the SATA one is obviously
/dev/sda. I would like to find a way to force the SATA one to be
/dev/sda always: using labels is only mitigating the issue of the (main)
disk flipping name, since some partitions are mounted via autofs which
does not accept labels, and others are Windows ones which again cannot
be mounted by labels at least to my knowledge.
In short, is there any mean (kernel parameter?) to force the SATA drive
come first? BTW on Fedora Core 6 this issue was never present.
Alfredo, I had the same problem when I added a SCSI controller into the
computer. The SCSI module was loaded first, then the SATA module. This
bumped the SATA drive that was sda to sdb, and nothing worked right.
Solution: extract the initial ramdisk, edit the 'init' script, and reorder
the module loading. Make sure the module for the sata is loaded before the
ide module.
Now, I am not familliar with the PIDE modules, so you are on your own
there. But I would look for a line like
insmod /lib/ide-scsi.ko
and put it after a line like: ( since I have the NVidia chipset)
insmod /lib/sata_nv.ko
shout out again, if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say
'initial ramdisk'
Otherwise: Think again about labels, that's what they are for. And you
have already booted grub, and grub found the initial ramdisk... That may
be all you need.
ed
