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#1 2009-10-10 13:53:42

panosk
Member
From: Athens, Greece
Registered: 2008-10-29
Posts: 241

Nasty experience with grub, fstab, and drive names

Hi all

Yesterday I tried to install Arch on one of my PCs.

After installing the base system and rebooting, grub complaint he couldn't find the proper partition/filesystem, etc. OK, this was something I had encountered in the past, so I started changing the drive assignment in the grub boot line. After an hour, I gave up and reinstalled thinking that maybe grub wasn't happy sitting in the same ext4 partition with /. So I created a separate ext3 /boot partition but I was still having problems. This time, however, after finding the correct drive assignment in the grub boot line, the kernel was loading and then I was greeted with a message saying that my / partition was probably not a valid filesystem, etc, etc. My first thought was to start changing the drive assignment in the kernel line, but this didn't help. Instead, kernel now couldn't boot at all, which means that the UUID in the kernel line was correct and the problem was occurring afterwards. After much thought, I loaded the / filesystem in read/write (according to the error message immediately after the kernel was loaded) and started examining the devices in /dev. To my huge surprise, after every reboot, the drive names (sda, sdb1, sdb2, etc) were different roll This meant that all my attempts at changing the entries in fstab were unsuccessful.

Fortunately, I was aware of the blkid command so I modified the fstab file and added the UUIDs instead of the drive names, which finally worked. Still to my surprise, when I log in to my desktop, the drive names are always different. My PC has a raid-0 configuration with 2 120GB sata drives and Windows XP, a 320 GB IDE drive with 2 partitions, and a Raptor WD 74GB which is devoted to Arch. The only thing that comes to my mind is the Plug n' Play option in the BIOS, which is set to NO, meaning that system resources are assigned by my motherboard and not by the OS.

If anyone has a clue why the drive names are different after every boot, I would be glad to hear.

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