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

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 09/01/2010 03:38 AM, Dale wrote:
> Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
>> On 08/27/2010 12:49 PM, Dale wrote:
>>> 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?
>>
>> You do the labeling *before* you switch to the new kernel. Once you
>> get it working correctly with your current kernel, then you can
>> upgrade to the new ATA drivers and it will just work (which is the
>> whole point of this exercise.)
>>
>
> OK. Finally got updated to a new kernel. [...]
>
> Anyway, this did sort of work out to be weird and not what I expected at
> all. I expected the drives to be laid out in this way:
>
> sda first drive with old ide
> sdb second drive with old ide
> sdc third drive with old ide
> sdd forth drive with a SATA controller
>
> Well, it actually sees the drive connected to the SATA controller first
> then the other drives follow along after that in order.

I mentioned this in a reply :P  Usually SATA drives go first.  (Emphasis 
on "usually.")


> Naturally when I
> first tried to boot I was pointing to sda6 for my root partition. Well,
> it was actually on sdb6. It did list the drives just before the error
> and the blinking lights on the keyboard. No scroll back either. :-( I
> saw just enough to be able to figure out what drives were what.
>
> Is there some way to get it to change this or am I stuck? My concern is
> that I plan to add another drive to the SATA card soon and that will
> move everything up another notch. I would really like the IDE drives to
> be seen first since I rarely change them.

What exactly is the problem you have?  You can't boot?  You can simply 
hit "Esc" in grub and go to text-only mode, and then "e" to edit the 
current grub boot entry.  There you can boot from somewhere else.