Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1558 mails)

[Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 12:18 PM, Clayton<smaug42@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I've been puzzling over this one for a while now.... not quite sure
> how or why openSUSE is seeing my hard drives in a different order than
> the BIOS and the physical connections are laid out.
>
> The hardware is like this:
>
> Channel 0 Master - EIDE - no connection
> Channel 0 Slave - EIDE - no connection
> Channel 1 Master - SATA Drive 1
> Channel 1 Slave - SATA Drive 2
> Channel 2 Master - SATA Drive 3
> Channel 2 Slave - SATA Drive 4
> Channel 3 Master - SATA DVD burner
> Channel 3 Slave - SATA Drive 5
>
> This is how it's physically connected, and in the BIOS, the drive
> order is the same - ie no fiddling with boot priorities etc.
>
> Now, when I fire up an openSUSE install DVD (or the partitioner on an
> existing install), it sees a totally different harddive order... like
> this:
>
> Drive 3 - sda - data drive
> Drive 4 - sdb - data drive
> Drive 5 - sdc - data drive
> Drive 2 - sdd - existing 11.1 install plus a home partition
> Drive 1 - sde - new drive
>
> Normally, it's not much of an issue what drive Linux is installed
> on... but I would like to understand why the physical connections are
> not matching the sda-sde devices...
>
> C.

The kernel probes ata controllers one at a time.  If you have 2 or 3
different controllers, then it will designate the drives as it sees
them appear.

If you change the order the drivers are loaded/probed it might change
the drive designations.

In 11.2 I suspect all the controllers will be probed simultaneously,
so we might start seeing randomness in the drive designations from one
boot to the next.  I'm not sure about that.  But in 11.2 I would
really make sure you are not depending on the designation, just to be
sure.

I'm not sure about the above.  But in the 11.2 kernel I'm pretty sure
there is a compile time switch to enable simultaneous ata controller
boot probing.  No idea how suse will compile their kernels.

Greg
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