I have a computer with an Intel mainboard (I"ll look up the exact model later if it matters) running Etch.
/ is an 80G SATA on SATA1. /data is a 500G SATA drive on SATA2. I've never had any trouble with the system. I ran out of space on /data so I've installed a 3rd drive, 750G. I've only got 2 SATA ports left, 3 and 4. If I plug the new drive into either one, the machine boots, the bios recognizes the new drive just fine, the boot info shows sdc, but after all the drive and ethernet detection, I get the following message: Begin: Waiting for root file system . . . . . . (I'll note here that as soon as I unplug the SATA cable from the new drive and reboot everything works again, so the original two drives & file systems are still just fine.) After some delay (two minutes?) I get this: Done. Check root= bootarg cat /proc/cmdline or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules ls /dev ALERT! /dev/sda2 does not exist. Dropping to a shell! Then I get a busybox/initramfs shell. ls /dev/sd* only shows: sda sdb sdb1 sdb2 sdc sdc1 From that I guessed that the boot order hand changed (obviously sdb now has the swap and root partitions, and c had the 1 data partition, and a is the blank new drive. So I rebooted and edited the GRUB commandline to make root=sdb2 and sure enough it works. Now, I guess I /can/ use this setup, and just modify /etc/fstab so that the thing will boot and mount properly on it's own, but I'd rather do something to it so that it doesn't get so confused about the order of the drives. The new drive should be sdc, and the old drives should be sda, and sdb, like they already were. Is there something I can do about this? To make the new drive be sdc, I mean? Thanks, JW -- ---------------------- System Administrator - Cedar Creek Software http://www.cedarcreeksoftware.com http://jwadmin.blogspot.com/