Richard Creighton wrote:
Jonathan Arnold wrote:
Richard Creighton wrote:
Greg Freemyer wrote:
<snip> I don't understand - you have full control over where the MBR is installed. By default, it goes on the first drive found. If you want to change that, you are free to do so. I don't understand why you have to unplug the IDE. I have the same setup (well, not RAID but a mix of IDE & SATA) and 10.3 actually installed better than 10.2 on this system. Not sure why you would blame the installation program.
Not true...the install program writes to the drive presented as the first bootable drive presented by BIOS under normal conditions, which under normal conditions is your IDE drive. My BIOS allows the SATA drive to be presented 1st and the IDE to be presented last which is the option I chose for this installation. When 10.3 renamed my IDE drive to SDA and it was bootable, IT became the drive where the install program wrote the MBR and I had NO CHOICE. FWIW, I had previously
At the installation screen, Expert Options tab, the Change... button lists the Booting option. Here you can set up both the Grub menu and where the MBR gets installed.
installed 10.2 on the SATA in the MD Raid so I had TWO 10.2 installations, one in the IDE drive and one in the 4 drive MD raid SATA array and it worked perfectly and the MBR for the MD Raid was written correctly on the SATA drive and left the IDE drive alone. When I attempted the same thing with the 10.3, the renaming of the IDE drive to SDA apparently occurred after the install of the program files and the GRUB and MBR updates went to the first bootable drive it now found which was, of course, SDA (formerly the IDE drive containing 10.2) and not the SATA drives containing the new 10.3 installation. So, I blame the installation program.
So, while the motive to migrate is honorable, the decision to do so unilaterally and without proper notice and warning about possible side effects between minor releases I maintain is and was still ill advised. To do so between version 10 and version 11 would have been
For one, 10.3 is still in testing. For another, the drive renaming is mentioned in the Release Notes:
http://www.suse.com/relnotes/i386/openSUSE/10.3/RELEASE-NOTES.en.html#08
The release notes are displayed *after* a successful installation is complete. Perhaps they should be displayed BEFORE the installation starts.
Big button at the lower left of the installation screens says: Show Release Notes
As to the fact that 10.3 is still in testing....I have beta tested every version since 9.3 and have always had a 2nd drive with my primary installation and a 2nd drive for the beta install. Starting with 10.2, I also had a new system with SATA drives which were used as the 2nd drive and I also experimented with MD Raid installation of 10.3 onto a 1TB MD Raid on those (4) SATA drives with no problems. I simply wasn't expecting with a minor version release, to have my primary IDE partition affected so drastically. If I had, I would have disconnected the IDE drive electrically but previous experience did not dictate that necessity. Had the installation program functioned properly, it still wouldn't have been necessary.
When you are installing a new OS, sharing the drives with an old OS, whether it is a dot upgrade or a brand new Linux, I would think making sure of where it was installing the MBR would be of a primary importance, and "assuming" you know where that is would be a bad idea in any case. -- Jonathan Arnold (mailto:jdarnold@buddydog.org) Linux Brain Dump - Linux Notes, HOWTOs and Tutorials: http://www.linuxbraindump.org Daemon Dancing in the Dark, an Open OS weblog: http://freebsd.amazingdev.com/blog/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org