From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org ([69.77.167.62] helo=lists.gentoo.org) by finch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1KKaTw-0000dr-F6 for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Sun, 20 Jul 2008 15:05:53 +0000 Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 57B23E0477; Sun, 20 Jul 2008 15:05:50 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail.muc.de (colin.muc.de [193.149.48.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DF822E0477 for ; Sun, 20 Jul 2008 15:05:49 +0000 (UTC) Received: (qmail 7697 invoked by uid 3782); 20 Jul 2008 15:05:48 -0000 Received: from acm.muc.de (pD9E50D23.dip.t-dialin.net [217.229.13.35]) by colin2.muc.de (tmda-ofmipd) with ESMTP; Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:05:37 +0200 Received: (qmail 1338 invoked by uid 1000); 20 Jul 2008 15:05:11 -0000 Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 15:05:10 +0000 To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: mount: "special device /dev/hdc does not exist". What does this mean? Message-ID: <20080720150510.GA1051@muc.de> References: <20080719185157.GA2376@muc.de> <20080719211213.GA1073@muc.de> Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.9i X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/1.1.5 (Fettercairn) From: Alan Mackenzie X-Primary-Address: acm@muc.de X-Archives-Salt: 8fcda736-a688-4f1f-bff2-456fe7259b76 X-Archives-Hash: c8b90161260f05d371fc36172ba38bf2 Hi, Nikos! On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 12:29:19AM +0300, Nikos Chantziaras wrote: > Alan Mackenzie wrote: > >>The default in new kernels is to only use /dev/sd*. > >I'm totally confused. Doesn't "sd*" mean "SCSI disk drive"? When I was > >installing Gentoo from the CD, I had to mount my main hard drive as > >/dev/sdb5. When I built my own kernel, it needed /dev/hdh5. > >This seems crazy. Is it documented anywhere in Gentoo? > Not sure. But if you have /dev/hd* instead of /dev/sd*, it means you > configured your kernel with the legacy IDE drivers instead of the new > (P)ATA drivers. The new drivers use /dev/sd* (for IDE/PATA/SATA and > SCSI alike; there's no difference anymore.) This was indeed the case. > The CD/DVD-ROM can show up as /dev/sd* even with the old legacy drivers > if you have enable "SCSI Emulation" for it. > In any event, try to build a new kernel using the new drivers. The old > legacy driver you're using will probably get declared "deprecated" at > some point (if it didn't happen already). [ Detailed instructions snipped - but they were appreciated and followed :-] Did this. It mapped my two hard drives (previously /dev/hd[gh]) to /dev/sd[ab], and created /dev/sda, dev/sda1, ..... So far, so good. However, it hadn't created /dev/sda16 or /dev/sda17 for some reason. A quick # ls -l /dev/sd{a15,b} gives: ... 8, 15 /dev/sda15 ... 8, 16 /dev/sdb In a philosophical mood, one might say that the new "unified", "enhanced", "better" IDE support is inadequate for my setup. What I actually said, I'm not going to repeat in a public mailing list. So the kernel guys have decided that nobody would ever want more than 15 partitions on a drive. It's a bit like the old MS-DOS restriction to 512 MB all over again. Hey, guys, hard drives nowadays are like 200 gig, not 512meg. What's so wrong about having partitions with sizes 1Gb, 2Gb, 4Gb, with maybe 100Mb for a boot partition? > < > Generic ATA support > unless you can't find a native driver for your chipset (I doubt you have > some extremely rare/exotic mainboard ;) The HPT370A UDMA100 chip (with my two hard drives) was no problem. For the VIA VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C "ordinary" IDE chip (the one with my two DVD drives attached), I tried configuring "VIA", which didn't work. Then I rebuilt the kernel again with "Generic ATA support", which didn't work either. Both of these created /dev/sdc and /dev/sdc1, but no /dev/sdd. When I tried # mount -t iso9660 /dev/sdc /cdrom, I got the "something's gone wrong, but we're not telling you what" error message. Trying to mount /dev/sdc1 gave exactly the same result. Actually, thinking about it, this was probably my USB stick it was trying to access. Nikos, do you happen to know the appropriate kernel mailing list where I could express the opinion that restricting the number of partitions on a drive to 15 isn't a good tradeoff? All in all, I really amn't impressed with this "modern" drive support. Besides quartering the max number of partitions on a drive, it confuses IDE and SCSI drives, thus confusing me, too. Previously, when I attached devices to the IDE1 socket, I knew they would appear at /dev/hd[cd]. Now, it would seem, the kernel assigns drives at random to /dev/sd[abcd...], so you can only determine by experiment which devices are at which "device". Nothing personal, Nikos. ;-) I think I need to go back to the traditional IDE handling. None of the Gentoo kernels I've built have even seen my two DVD drives, yet. I'll get there, somehow. Thanks! -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).