On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 12:18 PM, Clayton
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 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org