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Hi,
I upgraded my Arch install yesterday (pacman -Syu). The last one was four weeks ago. Among the packages updated were the stock kernel 2.6.17 and mkinitcpio, so the update generated another image /boot/kernel26.img.
Now I am having random errors while booting. One out of two (yes, 50%) boots ends with kernel panic while identifying the root fs type after initramfs and modules have been loaded. Something like "Can't find device dev(0,0)".
The apparent reason is that sometimes the boot partition is identified as hda2, sometimes as hde2. Because I have the kernel option root=/dev/hda2, boot is successful when boot partition is identified as hda2, and fails with the above message when it is identified as hde2.
My particular hardware is a Abit Be-6 motherboard (quite old) which has two ide ports and two other ide ports controlled by a Highpoint HPT366 controller (which support DMA 66). My HD is connected to one of those.
I suspect that the drive detection relies on some kind of information sent by the bios and that this information is sometimes sorted in one order, sometimes in another one, i.e. sometimes the ide ports first, sometimes the hpt366 ports first.
For information, the install cd-rom would see my drive as hde (always, not 50%) and until yesterday, the boot process would see it as hda (again, always, not 50%).
So now the questions for you, talented forum participants, are:
1/ I would like to understand how disk and partition letters/numbers are allocated: why hde2 and not hda2? Can I force the naming to hda2, whatever the Bios says (for example based on a HD ID or a IDE port ID)?
2/ I read the mkinitcpio wiki. From what I understand, I can configure what modules will be loaded at boot time for detecting my boot drive, either at image generation time, or at boot time with a kernel parameter. Would blacklisting ide modules and leave only hpt366 module help? Conversely, assuming I plug my HD in an IDE port, would blacklisting hpt366 module help?
Help will be much appreciated.
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change your mkinitcpio.conf to load the modules in correct order:
MODULES="yourhda2modulefirst thentheothermodule"
then rebuild initramfs, you should also add the correct order to the fallback config too, /boot/mkinitcpio-kernel26.conf
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Thanks Tobias. This solves my problem.
What I really like in Arch is that when you have an issue, you find a solution...
The only thing is that I guess I have now to include /etc/mkinitcpio.conf in the NoUpgrade list in pacman.conf to avoid surprises when it upgrades.
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The only thing is that I guess I have now to include /etc/mkinitcpio.conf in the NoUpgrade list in pacman.conf to avoid surprises when it upgrades.
The /etc/mkinitcpio.conf file is marked as "backup" in the mkinitcpio package. Therefore, if the default configuration changes, it will be extracted as /etc/mkinitcpio.conf.pacnew and your own configuration won't be touched.
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