Arch Linux

jjohnson0000

Member

Registered: 2010-01-02

Posts: 2

Arch, Arch installer and Sda/Sdb confusion

I have been attemping to install Arch and get kdemod up and running and I have been running into some issues.

Because of this, I have been reinstalling it quite a few times to get it to work.

My first main issue is this:

I have 3 physical hard drives in my computer.

A 1TB Sata drive
A 250GB IDe drive
A 80GB Sata drive.

For some reason, 75% of the time, when I boot from the Arch Installer cd, it detects my 1TB sata drive as Sda and the 250GB ide drive as Sdb

the other 25% of the time it detects the 250GB drive as Sda and the 1TB as Sdb

When it detects it as Sda, I am able to usually boot into Arch after it's installed.

When it detects it as Sdb, it will "sometimes" boot into arch.

The rest of the time, it seems to change it's mind and think that the 1TB drive is once again Sda and the 250GB ide drive is Sdb, which confuses the boot loader (I think)

Thanks in advance for any help

ralvez

Member

From: Canada

Registered: 2005-12-06

Posts: 1,694

Website

Re: Arch, Arch installer and Sda/Sdb confusion

I'm not sure as to why is "randomly"detecting the drives wrong ... having said that this is what I would do if confronted with that situation.
1. Disable in my BIOS the two small drivers.
2. Install Arch in the 1TB HDD ( I assume that's what you really want)
3. Once Arch is properly installed (you of courses reboot the machine to test that ) I would edit my /etc/fstab file and add the other drives. Like

/dev/sdb1 /home ext4 defaults 0 1
/dev/sdb2 /backups ext4 defaults 0 1

and that should give you a consistent and working system.

I hope this helps.

R.

Edit: Just one thing ... in step 3 you have to reboot your system and re-enable in the BIOS the other HDDs you disabled in step 1

Last edited by ralvez (2010-01-02 18:02:26)

some-guy94

Member

Registered: 2009-08-15

Posts: 360

Re: Arch, Arch installer and Sda/Sdb confusion

You can always use UUIDs

tavianator

Member

From: Waterloo, ON, Canada

Registered: 2007-08-21

Posts: 858

Website

Re: Arch, Arch installer and Sda/Sdb confusion

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Per … ice_naming

wonder

Developer

From: Bucharest, Romania

Registered: 2006-07-05

Posts: 5,941

Website

Re: Arch, Arch installer and Sda/Sdb confusion

http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/17632

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Gen2ly

Member

From: Sevierville, TN

Registered: 2009-03-06

Posts: 1,529

Website

Re: Arch, Arch installer and Sda/Sdb confusion

Some BIOS's auto-detect drives meaning that the first one that responds will be the first listed by the BIOS (and hence named sda, or hda...) which I guess is what is happening in this case.  Look at your BIOS and see if it has the ability to manually specify which is the first drive, second drive... as some of them are able to do this.

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