Arch Linux

Righard

Member

From: Netherlands

Registered: 2007-12-13

Posts: 29

My IDE drive is called sda

Hello,
There are two harddrive's in my pc. One is a SATA the other IDE. Normally (wutch other distrobutions or self-compiled kernels). The IDE drive is in /dev/hda and the sata in /dev/sda.
The funny thing is thar in Archlinux the are called /dev/sda (IDE) and /dev/sdb. Because the IDE drive contains all my important data and SATA contains the OS, you can guess the trouble this nearly got me into.

Is the a way to "fix" (I don't know if it is broken) this. For me this is very annoying because normaly I'm not cautious at all with my SATA drive.
Thank you

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: My IDE drive is called sda

It's not the distro that's responsible, it's the kernel version. The IDE & SATA code in the kernel was merged, months ago. There is no problem.

Misfit138

Misfit Emeritus

From: USA

Registered: 2006-11-27

Posts: 4,189

Re: My IDE drive is called sda

Yeah, this has been the case with Arch since I have been using it at version 0.7.2, over a year ago, so other distros must use symlinks, since the libata scheme was adopted all those kernel versions ago....?

Last edited by Misfit138 (2007-12-14 00:47:19)

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dmartins

Member

Registered: 2006-09-23

Posts: 360

Re: My IDE drive is called sda

You could try editing your /etc/mkinitcpio.conf file. Modify the HOOKS section and make sure 'ide' and 'sata' are included, but not 'pata'.
Save the file, and with your /boot partition mounted, run mkinitcpio -p kernel26. This will generate new initrd images to boot your PC, and they might just load up your IDE drive as hda and SATA and sda.
Really though, the /dev/sd? naming is the future and it's not that bad once you get used to it. In fact, I just installed gentoo for the first time in a few months and fought with it just to get my IDE drive recognized as /dev/sda!

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: My IDE drive is called sda

If ya want a meaningful name, create a udev rule to create a symlink in /dev/.

And no, "hda", "hdb" etc. are *not* meaningful names ;-)

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: My IDE drive is called sda

Or use persistent block device naming.

Righard

Member

From: Netherlands

Registered: 2007-12-13

Posts: 29

Re: My IDE drive is called sda

Thanks for the info,
I did not know that the code for IDE and SATA where merged.
dmartins is acctualy right, I should get used to the new names.