[clug] SATA install anyone?

[Darren Freeman]

On Sun, 2004-06-27 at 22:53, Duncan Roe wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Has anyone managed to install on a SATA-only system?

Yup. Software RAID on two SATA drives. I do have a pair of ATAPI optical
drives but I don't think that counts in your question.

> What is the /dev entry you give to fdisk?

Ahhhh =) It depends.

When I first installed Mandrake 10.0 on my VIA motherboard they were
/dev/hde and /dev/hdg.

I have also seen them on another motherboard, NVIDIA, as /dev/hda and
/dev/hdc which shifted my optical drives to /dev/hde and /dev/hdg.

But then I updated my kernel, immediately after install. Both kernels
were 2.6.x but now my drives are /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. The drives go
through the scsi subsystem now, using the sata_via module which is used
by the scsi_mod module.

My software RAID was then in for a world of hurt, you don't just go
around messing with device names on a software RAID, especially when you
boot from it. That must have cost me half a day of pain, and I am full
of contempt for whoever decided to move my drives without warning me.
Going from 2.6 to 2.6 is supposed to not break things like that, no?

Anyway I'm OK now but it's a lesson hard learned. Especially since the
rescue mode of the Mandrake install CD doesn't know about software RAID
even though that's the same CD that installed on a RAID in the first
place. Don't even get me started on Mandrake 10.0!

BTW the way to get out of the above situation on mirrored drives, is to
boot with the second drive unplugged. Fix the system with the rescue CD,
which mounts the partitions raw without going through RAID. Make the
system do a proper boot, it will detect the absence of the other drive
and mark it faulty. Then boot with it plugged in and do a raidhotadd on
it. No problems. Booting with both drives after mounting one during the
rescue however will lead to many fscks that mess up your drives
slightly. I had to dd my second drive to the first one to recover from
what fsck did. Better to force one to be removed until you're running a
kernel that knows about RAID.

> Cheers ... Duncan.

Have fun,
Darren