[Wolves] Now a Linux question

[David Goodwin]

Kevan wrote:
> OK, a serious question.  Any ideas why my Mandrake 10
> installs into hde rather than hda.  All cables, jumper
> switches on hard drives are correct.  It happens on
> two quite separate PC's.  It's just plain strange. 
> Doesn't really matter as I run SuSE 9.1 as my working
> drive/OS.
> 
> Kevan
> 


Haven't been following this conversation much, but just to chip in...

hda,b,c,d are used by the first two IDE channels, which are nearly 
always onboard (i.e. hda=primary (controller) master, hdc=secondary 
(controller) master, hdd = secondary (controller) slave).

If you have any IDE raid controllers, these will show up as hdX (where X 
is greater than d!) depending upon how the RAID controller is 
configured. If it allows you to group your disks into LUNS, then I'd 
expect you to be able to have anything up to hdz, after which I believe 
it goes to hdaa, hdab, hdac etc. (??).


I believe there is a kernel (or bios?) option which can be used to make 
the raid controller's disks appear as hda/b/c, but I may be wrong.


There is nothing wrong with it using hde as "/". This is perfectly 
normal. We have machines at work where hdc is "/" and they function fine.


(Interestingly, Windows doesn't seem at all affected if you move a disk 
from being primary master to secondary master, and it continues to 
work... Linux on the other hand isn't too keen and requires boot loader 
and fstab modifications).


David.