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

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

Dale writes:

> Hmmm, I use resierfs for my file systems, most of them anyway.  I still
> use e2fsprogs to change those?

No, but you can use reiserfstune -l.

> 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?

Don't know. But even if so the result is not cecessarily accurate.

My two SATA drives were sd[ab], but when I added two PATA drives those got 
these names, and the SATA ones became sa[cd]. But even this changes, with 
a kernel derived from GRML, the PATA ones were sd[bc], and the SATA ones 
sd[ad]. Weird, huh? And things become even mor eunpredictable when I have 
USB drives plugged in during boot. So I also suggest using labels or 
UUIDs.

My own method is yet another one. As I have everything on LVM (except for 
the /boot partitino, which is on an USB stick), my drives are identified 
by their volume group. /dev/weird is the system drive, /dev/weird2 is the 
identical backup drive. This way I do not have any /dev/sdX in either 
fstab or grub.conf. And when the system drive fails, I vgrename wird2 to 
weird, and then the backup drive will become the system drive.

	Wonko