At this time F7 is booted and from that I used fdisk to find the hard drive with F7 64 bit. As you can see it finds all the partitions as /dev/sdf.
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sdf: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdf1 1 1000 8032468+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdf2 1001 1141 1132582+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdf3 * 1142 2500 10916167+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdf4 2501 19457 136207102+ 5 Extended
/dev/sdf5 2501 2585 682731 83 Linux
mount -t ext3 /dev/sdf3 /fc4
[root k5di ~]#
[root k5di ~]# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 39674192 11689048 25937260 32% /
tmpfs 484484 0 484484 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda7 14832416 8021112 6057860 57% /home
/dev/sda6 108865 28993 74251 29% /boot
/dev/sdf3 10574036 3867712 6160516 39% /fc4
[root k5di ~]#
Note the last entry in df. That is /dev/sdf3 mounted on this computer which is /dev/sda5. I used fdisk and mount and df, three tools to show you what a hard drive has. No one can say that /dev/sdf doesn't exist on my computer. Some say the /dev/sdf3 is just a designator of a partition on a hard drive. To this I say there is nothing else! I can mount the designator and I discover it is a partition. Next I must turn off this computer and come up with the rescue CD so that neither computer is boot up. In this case with fdisk I found both hard drives have changed. The hard drive that had been /dev/sdf is now dev/sda. The one which had been /dev/sda is now /dev/sdb. How did this happen? Finally I boot up the computer on /dev/sdf3 and it becom!
es /dev
/sda. To my surprise I am booting it from /dev/sdb and not /dev/sdf. Here is what my grub.conf looks like. timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,5)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.22.9-91.fc7)
root (hd0,5)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.22.9-91.fc7 ro root=/dev/sda5 quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.22.9-91.fc7.img
title Fedora (2.6.22.7-85.fc7)
root (hd0,5)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.22.7-85.fc7 ro root=/dev/sda5 quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.22.7-85.fc7.img
title Fedora (2.6.22.5-76.fc7)
root (hd0,5)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.22.5-76.fc7 ro root=/dev/sda5 quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.22.5-76.fc7.img
title Fedora f7-64
rootnoverify (hd1,2)
makeactive
chainloader +1
Now if it seems to you that I do not understand what is happening then I got the message across.
You have it all worked out. The system now makes whichever drive has the root
filesystem /dev/sda. When you boot from the rescue disk the SATA bus on your system
takes precedence over the IDE bus on your motherboard since neither harddrive has
the root filesystem. When you boot F7-64 its root defines which drive shows as /dev/sda.
Squishy, but it is the new way. The reccomendation has been to use labels on all your
partitions and take care that they are all unique. Then use root=LABEL=bplpxwtz in the
kernel line in grub as well as labels in fstab. I have a transitional motherboard
that has an IDE 100 bus and a separate IDE 133 bus. The drive on the IDE 133 bus
which has Fedora was /dev/hde FC6 and previous incarnations. It now is /dev/sda
in F7 and Rawhide. Care must be taken when setting up multiboot systems to get
the unique partition labels.
Robert McBroom
