Joshua Penix wrote: > On Nov 17, 2006, at 5:48 PM, Carl Lowenstein wrote: > >> I also have not tried looking at the BIOS view of the system with the >> SCSI drives powered on. I only looked at the Host Adapter BIOS to >> verify that it saw them. Maybe it's time for another system shutdown. >> Makes it hard to read email, but I do have at least one other >> computer. :-) > > Try turning the BIOS off on your SCSI card. It's not needed if you're > not booting from anything attached to it. That should prevent GRUB from > picking it up, and it should cause it to get picked up only later in the > boot process when the drivers load. If the remaining problem is that > the drivers still pick it up as /dev/sda and that's not matching things > in /etc/fstab, then I'd recommend switching to volume labels (or LVM) > and take the device lettering out of the equation. >
There are (at least) 3 problems here, aren't there? JP's hiding the device during bios-extension processing may get some, but perhaps not all of the solution? 1. bios enumerates (potentially bootable) devices according to unknown (to me) rules, but the boot order can be set via bios configuration. I thought I remembered that changing the boot sequence does NOT change the enumeration order -- but now I'm not sure. 2. even when the boot sector is read from the desired boot device, grub still requires identifying the kernel and initrd per bios enumeration ordering (hdN,M). And, the kernel commandline containing ..ro root=.. can be given in either root=/dev/... or root=(hdN,M)... form, or also root=LABEL= (or probably? root=UUID=) form, too. info grub is not quite transparent enough, but I think google finds adequate examples. I have at times added an extra grub.conf stanza to deal with (eg) hd1 instead of hd0. Hmmm I have also even installed grub on both devices -- but that's getting even more UGLY. 3. after finding kernel (and initrd) and mounting root, you still need to make fstab work, eh? This is maybe where the use of labels (or, perhaps better[?], UUIDs) in fstab comes in handy. See man fstab, try dump /dev/sda*|grep -i uuid to see the UUID, or man e2label for the label. Christoph Meier had another way to determine the UUID in by reading /proc or maybe /sys -- but I haven't found that myself. <heh:> After you get it all figured out, how about a presentation or writeup? Regards, ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
