Richard Shaw wrote:
2008/6/18 Mikkel L. Ellertson <mikkel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
Kevin J. Cummings wrote:
The kernel assigns SCSI device names in the order it finds them from
searching the hardware. That's usually the boot device first. Check to see
if you can change the boot order in your BIOS, that usually helps.
This is not going to help - the kernel does its own search, and does not
rely on the BIOS order. (Grub does.) You could change the initrd so it only
has the SATA drivers, so the SATA drive would be the first one found.
Mikkel
Let me know if my thought process gets off track, but if the BIOS
points to the right boot device and grub listens to the BIOS that will
at least get you to the initrd, right? From that point couldn't you
specify the correct drive by label or UUID?
Richard
Thanks for the inputs, this is not quite solved yet and I think I
should expand on the background to put this in context:
What I am trying to do is to clone (rsync) F7 from the SATA drive to
the IDE drive (which also contains a bootable F7, just a different one
which is less up to date). I want to update (rsync) the IDE drive and
use it as my main drive from now on, and free up the SATA for other
uses. I know how to run grub-install and make things work
once I get past the partition-mkfs-rsync process.
So: I want the SATA to be my live system, and the IDE I want to muck
around with both at partition and filesystem level.
Here are some of the problems I encounter, and why some of the more
obvious tricks are not so usable.
1. The IDE always becomes /dev/sda{1,5,6,...,etc} if present.
1a. my fstab on both drives specifies /dev/sda{1,5,6,...,etc} explicitly.
2. Labels are problematic, because if there are two drives with the
same labels then F7 and F8 has the strange behavior that it will mount
the LAST partition found that has a matching label name. This will
often be from from the other drive, rather than the one that you
booted from. What F7 should do (I think) is "look for the label on
the boot drive first, and use that one if it exists". No such luck.
3. I'd rather not have to boot a rescue cd and hack /etc/fstab and/or
e2label when I try to boot with both drives, and then hack back again
later.
4. BIOS settings affects which drive's GRUB track gets executed,
but not the device name assignments.
5. UUID I do not know too much about, but it seems that it requires
hacking fstab back and forth, even worse than labels.
6. What I really need is a way, on the grub commandline, to force the
sata drive to be /dev/sda, and I will be in business. That is my
original question.
7. I wanted to circumvent the whole boot problem by attaching the IDE
post-boot using a usb-to-ide/mini-ide/sata converter to mount the
IDE. Unfortunately the coverter only works for mini-ide and sata
drives, and ide disks do not become mountable.
I agree with Mikkel that BIOS settings do not help me. Maybe I should
try something more radical like booting the IDE=/dev/sda and erase the
boot track and partition table of /dev/sda on the live system, using
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda count=1 bs=512. It just might work.
What really gets me is that the opposite process, i.e. cloning the
system from the IDE drive to the SATA drive, went very smoothly a few
months ago, for obvious reasons. But the reverse is very difficult
because of the device ordering and name assignment.
I wish I knew how to hack initrd....or maybe not :).
--
fedora-list mailing list
fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
