Do HD's have to be on hda to boot?

cayenne · l33t Joined: 17 Oct 2002 Posts: 945 Location: New Orleans

Hello all,
Starting to do the partitioning part....and when I threw the system together, I ended up putting my DVD drive and CDRW drive together on the primay ide controller, my 2 harddrives are on hdc and hdd.

Will this be a problem? Does Linux (Gentoo in particular) require the booting drives be on the primary controller and be hda?

TIA,

cayenne

count · Posted: Sat Oct 19, 2002 3:31 pm Post subject:

I think as long as the BIOS can find your boot loader (i'm assuming its GRUB) you should have no problem.

Just make sure your boot order in you BIOS setup includes the drive you want to put grub on. If your drive is not there you will not be able to boot it and should move your drive to primary master, or somewhere the BIOS can find it.

hope this helps.
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rac · Posted: Sat Oct 19, 2002 5:58 pm Post subject:

Depending on your motherboard, you may have performance problems with this setup. Some IDE controllers can only do DMA on the primary IDE channel.
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nikai · Posted: Sat Oct 19, 2002 6:11 pm Post subject:

Considering performance, there are some common cases where I'd prefer a setup with one harddrive per controller:
- accessing both harddrives at the same time, and
- copying from cd to cd
But I'm just guessing, I never did benchmarks.

rac · Posted: Sat Oct 19, 2002 6:29 pm Post subject:

rommel · Posted: Sat Oct 19, 2002 6:49 pm Post subject:

i have installed gentoo using hde and hdg...the only hitch i have run into is the gentoo installation sometimes hangs while checking the drives....but i dont see this as a linux issue but mainly a gentoo specific one.

that being said i have had better luck with promise controllers then highpoint

nikai · Posted: Sat Oct 19, 2002 7:22 pm Post subject:

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Of potential interest:

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cayenne · l33t Joined: 17 Oct 2002 Posts: 945 Location: New Orleans

Hello, and thanks for all the response.

Ok, I've already gotten to the point where I've compilled my kernel on install, about to choose the cron that I want.

If I want to switch them, will this be a s easy as turning the machine off..and swithing the
cables ...move the drives to primary and cd and dvd to secondary? Or...is there anything after initial install that will blow doing it ie: things mapped to hdd and hdc......

I hope not to start all over again...took most all day to get to the point of recompiling the
kernel.

Should I just keep going on the initial install....and when it comes time to reboot...shut down and swtich the cables?

What is the best method ya'll can suggest to make this less painfull. I need this box to be fast as I'm building it to be a PVR (DVR) type box...and need all the speed I can get out of it...

Thanx in advance!!

cayenne

:roll:

rac · Posted: Sun Oct 20, 2002 6:00 pm Post subject:

You should be fine - the only things that care about the physical drive numbers and locations are your bootloader and /etc/fstab. Just make sure you have an install CD or boot floppy or something that you can use to boot and make changes to those if it doesn't work right the first time.
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For every higher wall, there is a taller ladder