On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 12:15:50 Bob S wrote:
On Thursday 07 August 2008 12:06:30 am Felix Miata wrote:
But will I have to manually edit the 10.3 fstab and grub ? I already have 10.3 mounting with labels and was intending to do that on 11.0
Your 10.3 fstab won't be affected.
But the fstab will report the incorrect device node. At least it did so when I installed 10.3. Even though it renamed /dev/hda1 to /dev/sdb1 it was still named /dev/hda1 in the fstab of 10.2
You need to understand exactly what is happening here. Device nodes are only relevant to the operating system that you are currently running. Your system has two physical disk controllers - one IDE and one SATA. Each of these controllers has two disk interfaces (I am making an assumption here). Connected to these disk controllers are physical hard disks - two x IDE and one SATA disk. When Linux boots, udev assigns a device node to each physical disk. In the case of 10.2, /dev/hda, /dev/hdb and /dev/sda. 10.3 calls them /dev/sda, /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc where /dev/sda is the SATA disk and /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc are the IDE drives. 11.0 assigns the IDE drives first (as did 10.2) and so you also have /dev/sda, /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc but /dev/sdc is the SATA disk. These device nodes do not exist at boot time and are not recorded on the disk, hence the reference in menu.lst to hd(0,1) which is the second partition on the first physical hard drive. They are created by udev (older systems that don't use udev had the device nodes created at installation time or using the mknod command) and are simply logical files that abstract the actual interface to the hard disk device driver. Remember, in unix "everything is a file". The device nodes may be used by mount to mount the various partitions to previous mount points as defined in /etc/fstab. Each version that you have installed (10.2, 10.3, 11.0) has its own /etc/fstab file. Since the device nodes are created by udev according to predefined rules, they will always be the same for each respective version i.e. when 10.3 is running they will match what is in 10.3's /etc/fstab; likewise when 11.0 is running they will match /etc/fstab on the 11.0 partition. There are two alternatives to mounting by device node - by volume label or by GUID (globally unique identifier). Mounting by volume label is by far the easiest to understand and manually configure. It has been covered in other emails in this thread. In other words, don't be perturbed by the fact that 10.2, 10.3 and 11.0 seem to use different device nodes for the same devices. The only ones that matter are the ones relevant to the currently running version. Hope this helps. -- =================================================== Rodney Baker VK5ZTV rodney.baker@iinet.net.au =================================================== Probable-Possible, my black hen, She lays eggs in the Relative When. She doesn't lay eggs in the Positive Now Because she's unable to postulate how. -- Frederick Winsor