Knecht: ->Not sure I can help, but I end up with a few questions from reading this. Maybe your answers will lead someone else to give you a good pointer. Mostly I'm confused about your hda/hdb comments with respect to SATA drives which are normally on a cable by themselves. In my experience hda/hdb are the EIDE drive designations. With two controllers you then get hda-hdd for EIDE and hde for SATA.<- I know, it's really weird. The motherboard/chipset actually puts the SATA drive on the primary master channel (hda). I think that's what's screwing me up. I'd have to remove it if I wanted to put some other device on primary master, since I can't move it to another channel or to a normal standalone SATA channel. ->If you are really using EIDE drives then switching the order of the drives can be a problem *if* the drives were not configured for auto-detect *and* you forgot to change the jumpers. I don't know if this would cause the problem that you are seeing though.<- No, I set the jumpers to master/slave manually... also tried "cable-select." No dice. Seems to me there are two really weird issues with how linux sees the ide channels on my board: 1) SATA drive is ALWAYS hda - no way to change that in BIOS (this is a DFI motherboard, by the way, with the nforce2 chipset) 2) Secondary Slave is seen as scd0 (at least with the CD/DVD RW). Hdparm sees the DVD drive as hdd (I can hdparm /dev/hdd), but I can't access the drive through /dev/hdd - /dev/cdrom is a link to /dev/scd0. It works as hdb or hdc if I put it on another channel. Weird weird. Grub lives on hda (I'm currently dual-booting), but when I put the ide drive with the /boot partition on (what should be) the hdd channel, the kernel (which lives on that drive) panics because it can't find init. It's a really messed up setup, which I assume is probably to get around some problem in windows or something, though - I've had nothing but problems with windows, too. I'm ready to ditch this board once a load of cash falls into my lap. =o) I'm wondering if this is an nforce thing, or if there's something else on the board that's causing it (anyone have an asus nforce2 board? Is it similar?) - could be the SATA controller... also, with this chipset you have to feed acpi=off noapic nolapic to the kernel to get the damn thing to run in the first place (some of you may remember a post I sent about setting the system bus clock to the appropriate value).... anyway, it's been a real hassle all around. Maybe the 2.6 kernel would work with it better, but I'm hesitant to put it on there right now, since this is my only computer. Matt
