On Wed, 3 Oct 2007, ed(a)hp.uab.edu 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
--
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Alfredo Ferrari || Tel.: +41.22.767.6119 |
| C.E.R.N. || Fax.: +41.22.767.7555 |
| European Laboratory for Particle Physics|| |
| AB Division / ATB Group || e-mail: |
| 1211 Geneva 23 || Alfredo.Ferrari(a)cern.ch |
| Switzerland || Alfredo.Ferrari(a)mi.infn.it |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+