Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Old IDE drives and the "newer" PATA kernel drivers

["J. Roeleveld" <joost@antarean.org>]

On Friday 27 August 2010 11:49:00 Dale wrote:
> J. Roeleveld wrote:
> > On Friday 27 August 2010 11:00:58 Jesús J. Guerrero Botella wrote:
> >> 2010/8/27 Nikos Chantziaras<realnc@arcor.de>:
> >>> On 08/27/2010 10:37 AM, Dale wrote:
> >>>> I been putting this off but it looks like the newer kernels are going
> >>>> to push me to changing this real soon. I have a older system, Abit
> >>>> NF7 2.0 motherboard with the older IDE drives. I'm still using the
> >>>> older IDE drivers. This is what I have currently:
> >>>> 
> >>>> hda Actual hard drive OS on this
> >>>> hdb Actual hard drive Not in use
> >>>> hdc Actual hard drive home partition
> >>>> hdd DVD burner Duh! It's a burner.
> >>>> sda Actual hard drive connected through a SATA PCI card. Misc stuff.
> >>> 
> >>> The advice by the other posters to label your disks is a good one.  I'm
> >>> using labels too.  Not sure why I didn't think to mention it :P
> >>> 
> >>> Applying labels to your filesystems is trivial.  Simply use the e2label
> >>> utility (it's in the sys-fs/e2fsprogs package and installed by default,
> >>> so there's nothing new to emerge).  For example, if your hda1 is your
> >>> 
> >>> root partition and your hda2 your swap, you can label them like this:
> >>>   e2label /dev/hda1 GentooRoot
> >>>   e2label /dev/hda2 GentooSwap
> >>> 
> >>> Note: hda1, not just hda.  You are labeling the filesystem on a
> >>> partition, not the whole drive.
> >>> 
> >>> After you label all your filesystems, you simply modify your /etc/fstab
> >>> like this:
> >>> 
> >>> Before:
> >>> /dev/hda1  /  ext4  noatime  0 1
> >>> /dev/hda2  none  swap  sw  0 0
> >>> 
> >>> After:
> >>> /dev/disk/by-label/GentooRoot  /  ext4  noatime  0 1
> >>> /dev/disk/by-label/GentooSwap  none  swap  sw 0 0
> >>> 
> >>> That is, you simply change "/dev/blah" to
> >>> "/dev/disk/by-label/DriveLabel" and that's it.
> >> 
> >> Or you can do it by uuid, all the info you need can be picked from this
> >> output:
> >> 
> >> $ ls /dev/disk/by-uuid/ -l
> >> 
> >> Then just add lines to fstab like this:
> >> 
> >> UUID="6ea2b219-0bcc-4c90-9960-82a9659e6d0e" / ext4 noatime 0 1
> > 
> > True, except that for mere mortals, Labels are slightly easier to read
> > and understand :)
> > 
> > And that, I find, is less prone to mistakes.
> > 
> > --
> > Joost
> 
> Hmmm, I use resierfs for my file systems, most of them anyway.  I still
> use e2fsprogs to change those?

Nope:
eve ~ # reiserfstune --help
reiserfstune: unrecognized option '--help'
reiserfstune: Usage: reiserfstune [options] device [block-count]

Options:

  -j | --journal-device file    current journal device
  --journal-new-device file     new journal device
  -o | --journal-new-offset N   new journal offset in blocks
  -s | --journal-new-size N     new journal size in blocks
  -t | --trans-max-size N       new journal max transaction size in blocks
  --no-journal-available        current journal is not available
  --make-journal-standard       new journal to be standard
  -b | --add-badblocks file     add to bad block list
  -B | --badblocks file         set the bad block list
  -u | --uuid UUID|random       set new UUID
  -l | --label LABEL            set new label
  -f | --force                  force tuning, less confirmations
  -V                            print version and exit

IOW (as example):
reiserfstune -l ROOTDISK /dev/hda1

> Is there a way to boot a Gentoo/Knoppix CD and make it use the PATA
> drivers?  That way I can boot it and see exactly how it will name them
> and what drive is what without actually changing anything at all.  Is
> there a boot option "noide" or some other switch I can use?

Afraid not.
The naming scheme is, officially, not constant and can change with reboots.

On my server, with hotswap, I get different device-names when I remove a disk 
and plug it back in.
Eg. /dev/sdb -> /dev/sdj
(as example)
Don't think you'll have that particular issue, but having these names change 
between reboots is possible. Especially if a drive fails and is not found 
during boot or a new drive is added.

Not tested, but I believe USB-drives might also get pushed into the mix?

--
Joost