udev & pci problem

[thuhfreak]

i have an apple powermac g3/350. i also have an added ata card in one of the pci slots. an extra internal hd is attached to this card. gentoo sees it fine, but can only see the partitions like 40% of the time; one of the partitions on the extra drive is osx, and osx of course can always see that hd. oh, and my kernel is gentoo-dev 2.6.7-r8.

i don't fully understand udev or /dev in general, but i know a little. i've figrued out that when this drive comes up, its in /dev as /dev/hdb. the partitions are /dev/hdb{1,2,3}. for one reason or another, i'm not using a ramfs or tmpfs or anything special for /dev, so its just another folder on /, and nodes persist through reboots. so /dev/hdb3 (the important one) is always there. but the creation/mod dates are different for /dev/hdb{1,2,3} and /dev/hdb. hdb is always made (atleast everytime so far) on reboot. the partitions dont always make it. so their dates are a little behind. attempting to read them (less -f /dev/hdb3) results in "No such device or address".

mac-fdisk -l /dev/hdb reports that it can't make out a partition table (rather it claims no partition map exists, which is a bald faced lie). i thought that was peculiar, so i got this ingenius idea to copy out the data from /dev/hdb to a temp file, and see if mac-fdisk liked that. so i used 'dd' to copy a few megs from /dev/hdb (not knowing how big the part table was, i copied over like 2 or 3 megs) to a temp file. then let mac-fdisk look at that temp file. from there it sees the part table correctly.

so, i'm back at my ignorance of /dev. i know how to make nodes in there, but with udev that doesn't really work (right?). the aged /dev/hdb3 is marked '3, 67' with presumably important numbers (i think i seen em called "major" and "minor" numbers somewhere). /dev/hdb is '3, 64' and hdb1 is '3, 65' and hdb2 is '3, 66'.

I tried learning about udev, but I'm a bit lost. I think the kernel calls /sbin/hotplug when it encounters each device, and from there delegate commands setup nodes in /dev (right?). i tried calling /sbin/hotplug, and several executables in /etc/hotplug/ and /etc/hotplug.d/default, to no avail.

heres what seems to be a relevant part of the syslog: