On Wed, 3 Oct 2007, ed@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
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
Thanks a lot for the answer. I tried to work with the initial ramdisk, I
managed to edit the init and, sigh, there is no ide module loaded,
apparently the libata + ata_piix do both PATA and SATA in recent kernels,
so apparently there is no obvious way to get the disks in the "right"
order. Googling a bit I found other people complaining that PATA's are
recognized before SATA's now... so I am still with my problem.
Labels are fine for ext3 partition and no automount, while I have Windows
partitions as well, and a lot of partition with automount (just because
the second disk is there sometimes yes sometimes no)
Thanks a lot for the help
Alfredo Ferrari
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