On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 03:32:49PM +0000, Ken Moffat wrote: > On Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 08:43:04PM -0800, Greg KH wrote: > > > > Can't you just boot with /dev/disk/by-id/ and an initramfs to not have > > to worry about such a thing in the future? > > Initramfs isn't something I've ever tried, so I'm not about to rush into it on the server. Maybe I'll try it on a desktop one day. Anyway, I've now got it running without ide=reverse, details follow for anybody else who gets a similar problem in the future. > Can comebody remind me what the initramfs is for in that situation, > please ? From the little I've noticed, I thought the /dev/disk/by-id > part went into fstab ? At the moment, I just build the things I > think I need in to the kernel on that box, without modules. > And for the next person asking this, it seems to be so that you can specify the root= parameter. > Anyway, I'll try to find time to read my notes to see if I can > identify what happened/when, and to take the box down again so I > can try to confirm exactly what the problem is, if it still exists. > I certainly won't be taking it down until I've written my weekly > backups to tape at the weekend, so maybe not before next week. > Turns out I was wrong about having a SATA disk for the system - I used to, but then I needed to separate the backups into separate r/o and r/w filesystems when nfs no longer let me export part of a ro fs as rw. In the change, my staging area for writing to tape or DVD moved to the system disk, and the only big-enough disk I could get locally was parallel ide. So in that setup, ide on a card comes first. > > Have you tried the PATA drivers instead of IDE to see if this solves the > > "moves around" issue? If they work, then you would not need the command > > line option at all. > My first thought was to try using libata for the drives on the add-on card (sii0680), although it's marked as experimental. Maybe I picked the wrong driver, but they didn't show up. Reverted to previous config. Changed to mount-by-label so that I don't have to change fstab for the old and new kernels. Moved the main drive and the CD to libata (sii still old IDE) - specify sda instead of hda in root=, change system scripts referencing drives by name (for SMART - system disk is again -d ata, the data raid moved from hd{e,g} to hd{a,c}), now seems to be working but I expect I'll notice a few things more in my scripts over the next days. I also discovered that lilo needed the real node specified in root= to exist. It complained, so I added a symlink to the hdaX node - panic'd trying to load rootfs from 0307. Reboot to old kernel, run mknod on /dev, repeat, booted. Ken -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html