Arch Linux

aardwolf

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2005-07-23

Posts: 310

What device names do disks get?

On my previous Arch box, I had two IDE harddisks, which got device names hda and hdb, partitions got numbers like hda1, hda2, etc... If I attached an USB stick or camera to it, then that USB disk got name sda1

On my new Arch box, there's 1 SATA disk, and the partitions on it get names sda1 to sda7.

This sda is the name that an USB device got on my previous computer. Why is the hard disk here sda instead of hda? What do the s and the h stand for?

If on my new Arch box, I attach the two disks of the old computer (to copy over the files), then the SATA disk suddenly becomes sdc instead of sda. To be able to boot Arch, I have to change the path in grub, as well as changing all sda's into sdc's in fstab and reboot.

Why does it change the name of the disk if I attach new disks? Is there a way to attach two IDE disks to this computer while keeping the name sda for the SATA disk, or is there no way to interfere with the naming process that linux uses?

Ramses de Norre

Member

From: Leuven - Belgium

Registered: 2007-03-27

Posts: 1,289

Re: What device names do disks get?

The s is for sata and scsi devices (usb drives and such do also get an s), but with the new pata driver from linux-2.6.20 and later (which replaces ide-legacy) also ide drives get an s instead of h. So In the near future all drives will have names like sda and sdb and such.
If you haven't got that yet you're still using the old driver and might want to replace "ide" in mkinitcpio with "pata". The order in which the drives are named is defined by:
* The order in which the pata and sata modules get loaded, the first one gets the first names.
* The order of the drives on their buses.

hightower

Member

Registered: 2006-04-02

Posts: 182

Re: What device names do disks get?

I can recommend this wiki article: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Per … ice_naming

hightower

Last edited by hightower (2007-05-12 12:38:03)