Possible to switch ide drives back to hdX or at least boot by UUID?

xamindar · 2011-08-15 00:29:15

I have been messing around for a while on this machine trying to get it to boot properly from a compact flash card connected to the ide controller. It boots fine by using the /dev/sda designation in grub but will not work using UUID.

Here is the set up:
It is a headless machine (not now though, until booting is properly set up)
The boot drive is connected to the only ide controller in the machine.
There are two onboard sata ports and a 4 port sata adapter that may or may not have drives connected on boot-up
So here is the problem; when a sata drive is connected to the onboard sata port they take priority in linux's naming of the devices. So with one sata drive connected my boot drive now becomes /dev/sdb under linux. The bios still boots off the ide drive and grub still finds the proper stuff on the ide drive. I tried to solve the issue by using UUIDs but the kernel is unable to locate the uuid upon boot. I tried using mkinitcpio to create an initramfs but either mkinitcpio doesn't prepare one with udev support or there is something else causing it just not to work.

So I am thinking if the kernel was able to be set to give all ide drives /dev/hdx designations like it used to pre-2007 everything would work perfectly. Anyone know if that is even possible anymore in recent kernels?

Or, if anyone knows what is needed to boot from uuid that would work as well.

Here is what I have in grub's menu.lst:

# (1) Arch unRAID
title Arch unRAID
root  (hd0,0)
kernel /kernel-2.6.32.24-unRAID root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/3fba6525-8f8b-4ddd-bb18-4a1f61104aa0 ro acpi_enforce_resources=lax
initrd /kernel-2.6.32.24-unRAID.img

The above is not working. The kernel panics with a statement about not being able to find the root under that uuid.

Thanks again for any help.

slytux · 2011-08-15 04:14:05

Try rebuilding the initramfs image without 'scsi' and 'sata' in the HOOKS array. I had a similar problem when I had to remove 'pata' because I had an IDE drive that I was using for a secondary disk.

signor_rossi · 2011-08-15 07:52:47

Did you follow the UUID guide on the wiki?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/UUID#by-uuid

xamindar · 2011-08-20 19:06:50

slytux wrote:

Try rebuilding the initramfs image without 'scsi' and 'sata' in the HOOKS array. I had a similar problem when I had to remove 'pata' because I had an IDE drive that I was using for a secondary disk.

Ok I tried this and still got a kernel panic. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by removing pata as well. Isn't that required to detect the ide drives? I guess I could try removing it as well and see what happens.

xamindar · 2011-08-20 19:08:12

signor_rossi wrote:

Did you follow the UUID guide on the wiki?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/UUID#by-uuid

Yes I did. While the uuid info in fstab works fine I am still unable to get grub to boot with uuid.

whiterabbit · 2011-08-29 14:06:33

Try this for your root definition in the kernel line of your menu.cfg :

root=UUID=3fba6525-8f8b-4ddd-bb18-4a1f61104aa0

Arch Linux

#1 2011-08-15 00:29:15

Possible to switch ide drives back to hdX or at least boot by UUID?

#2 2011-08-15 04:14:05

Re: Possible to switch ide drives back to hdX or at least boot by UUID?

#3 2011-08-15 07:52:47

Re: Possible to switch ide drives back to hdX or at least boot by UUID?

#4 2011-08-20 19:06:50

Re: Possible to switch ide drives back to hdX or at least boot by UUID?

#5 2011-08-20 19:08:12

Re: Possible to switch ide drives back to hdX or at least boot by UUID?

#6 2011-08-29 14:06:33

Re: Possible to switch ide drives back to hdX or at least boot by UUID?

Board footer