Changing drive controller boot order

Entropy42 · n00b Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 56

I'm in the process of installing Gentoo on a new fileserver box. It will be running RAID 5, but the root partition will not be RAIDed for simplicity.

I'm having a problem with drive ordering though - My motherboard is an EPoX EP-9NPA+ SLI, which has a total of 6 SATA ports. 4 are supplied by the NForce4, 2 are supplied by a Silicon Image controller. In both my BIOS and the Gentoo Install LiveCD for AMD64, the NForce controller was detected first, and hence the drive connected to the first port on that controller (SATA 1 on my new mobo) was mapped to /dev/sda

Now for the problem - after rebooting with a freshly compiled kernel, the Silicon Image controller is now getting detected first, and as a result, what SHOULD be /dev/sde on my system is now /dev/sda, and what SHOULD be /dev/sda is currently /dev/sdb

How can I change the order that Linux assigns the drives in?

I used to know how to do this, but it's been years since I've done something like this and I've forgotten where to look.

Edit: Oh, one other thing - GRUB thinks the drives are in the correct order (hd0 = first drive on the NV controller). It's just the kernel that is getting confused.

Zaventh · n00b Joined: 30 Jan 2006 Posts: 16

Can't you just write down what the new drive assignments are in /dev, boot into the gentoo install cd enviroment, edit your fstab with the proper values and reboot?

nixnut · Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2006 5:48 pm Post subject:

Some info here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3044402.html#3044402
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Entropy42 · n00b Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 56