On Wed, 6 Aug 2008 20:43:36 James Knott wrote:
Bob S wrote:
Now you can see why I am afraid. I think the very least it will do is mess up the fstab's and Grub. So,,, to all the hard disk guru's out there what do you think. Ever seen or heard of this before? Any comments, idea's suggestions?
BTW this all started with that untested libata garbage.
Bob S
Before you start, make note of your current disk configuration. Then, instead of accepting what the install proposes, just configure it the way you want. It will see your existing partitions. I don't have a system being installed handy at the moment, but that option is available in every Suse install I've seen.
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Reading Bob's original email it is clear that his concern is caused by the fact that the device nodes for each of his hdd's have changed twice; once when he installed 10.3 and now again when attempting to install 11.0. It seems that 10.3 and 11.0 are both detecting the hdd's and allocating device nodes in a different order, both to each other and to the original 10.2 install. Bob - Windows likes to be on the first hdd. It appears that under 10.3 the SATA drives are detected and allocated device nodes before the PATA (IDE) drives. Since the device nodes for hdd's are all now using the /dev/sd[a-z] format with /dev/hd[a-z] being deprecated, the SATA drive appeared as /dev/sa (as expected) but the IDE drives were remapped from /dev/hda and /dev/hbd to /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc (as expected). This could potentially cause problems for booting Windoze which likes to be on the first hdd. It would also appear that 11.0 has modified this behaviour, with the 2x PATA/IDE drives now being reported in their original order, but as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb instead (using the new convention) with the SATA drive coming afterwards. This won't bother Windoze. It also shouldn't bother 10.3 since when it boots it will allocate the device nodes as it does now; 11.0 will cope also. I would suggest though, as someone else did, to label your partitions on both the 10.3 and 11.0 installs (using tune2fs -L <label>) and then modify /etc/fstab to mount by label rather than device node. Use unique labels between 10.3 and 11.0 (I mean don't re-use volume labels across the 2 installs) If you then choose to mount common partitions between your 10.3 and 11.0 installs the system will always mount the correct partition on the correct mount point and the 10.3 and 11.0 fstab entries for that common partition will be the same (so you don't get confused later). I hope that makes it slightly clearer than mud... -- =================================================== Rodney Baker VK5ZTV rodney.baker@iinet.net.au =================================================== Swahili, n.: The language used by the National Enquirer to print their retractions. -- Johnny Hart