Pre-installation - weird hard drive assignment

stdPikachu · Apprentice Joined: 10 Mar 2004 Posts: 254 Location: UK

Having just got my MythTV box installed properly with everything working (yay!), I'm about to replace my ancient RH installation on my desktop with a nice fresh Gentoo installation.

As such, I was mucking about with adding a new hard drive and stuff, and have discovered a rather odd "error". I'm posting this before I install since I'm unsure if it'll cause problems later on.

System disc boots off the motherboard IDE0 (primary master) controller - you'd expect this to be hda1.

There are two other disks hanging off a 2-port Promise TX2 IDE controller in a PCI slot that are used for holding documents and music. I just booted the system up with a Gentoo LiveCD to do a bit of pre-install partitioning and formatting, and a very weird thing happens.

The 120GB drive I just installed on IDE0 of the Promise Controller gets reported as hda. The second drive on this controller gets reported as hdd and the primary system drive (the one I'll be installing Gentoo onto) is shown as hde.

I'm sure I could prolly just install and be damned, but I had problem a while back with a Debian install onto a disc that wasn't seen as hda (I thought only Windows was that stupid?!). The system disc is assigned to init first in the BIOS, and I thought that was all there was to it. : shrugs :

So: firstly, is there any way of finagling the hard drive assignments so that the drives are reported in the "correct" order?

Secondly, if this isn't possible, will Gentoo be bootable if I do install it to hde?

I'd be tempted to install it and see, but obviously I don't fancy wasting hours installing a system that won't boot.

Thanks for any help!

deadaim · Guru Joined: 27 Oct 2003 Posts: 467 Location: Florida

I'm pretty sure that a cdrom drive gets addressed to as hdX, X being a number. That may be why it skips from hda to hdd.

If you decide to install Gentoo on hde, there should be no problems as long as you edit your grub.conf file accordingly.

Z? · Posted: Sat May 15, 2004 7:32 pm Post subject:

At a guess, this is because the "Boot off-board chipsets first" option is turned on on the Gentoo LiveCD (but I might be wrong). Appending "ide=reverse" to the boot command should get you the results you expect...

(From the kernel config help, under ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL Support -> IDE, ATA and ATAPI devices -> Boot off-board chipsets first support:

stdPikachu · Apprentice Joined: 10 Mar 2004 Posts: 254 Location: UK

-=GGW=- $ol!d $n4>|e · Veteran Joined: 12 Apr 2004 Posts: 1616 Location: USA

ya you could also brose d4 forums and it would bring up, once chrooted go to an externel console and type

mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev

then arrange all the configs as though your root drive was /dev/hda this is odd i know but when you reboot it will work ok :wink:

stdPikachu · Apprentice Joined: 10 Mar 2004 Posts: 254 Location: UK

Thanks Z, the ide=reverse boot param sorted it, so I guess the boot kernel does have the "boot offboard" switched on. I now have a nice stage 1 up and running, and for the first time ever I didn't muck up my grub.conf!

Can't get distcc working, but that's another story.

Z? · Posted: Sun May 16, 2004 10:36 pm Post subject:

Excellent. Glad to help/hear it works, since I was guessing. :lol: