Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: "Jörg Schaible" <joerg.schaible@×××.de>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-user] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Changing boot device with 2.6.36
Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2011 13:15:14
Message-Id: ig9nj8$vmo$2@dough.gmane.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Re: Re: Re: Changing boot device with 2.6.36 by "J. Roeleveld"
1 Hi Joost,
2
3 J. Roeleveld wrote:
4
5 > On Friday 07 January 2011 09:47:28 Jörg Schaible wrote:
6 >> Hi Dale,
7 >>
8 >> Dale wrote:
9 >> > Jörg Schaible wrote:
10 >> >> that approves my tests ... :-/
11 >> >>
12 >> >> Had to boot this morning 5 times, since the root device switched
13 >> >> arbitrarily between sde3 and sdg3 and I've chosen by bad luck always
14 >> >> the wrong one. It seems there is also some timing involved regarding
15 >> >> the initialization of the available devices ... sigh.
16 >> >>
17 >> >> - Jörg
18 >> >
19 >> > I had to reboot last night and was in my BIOS looking for other things
20 >> > but did notice this feature. I have a setting in my BIOS that tells it
21 >> > what drive to look for to boot first. It's above the part where you
22 >> > tell it to boot CDROM, hard drive, floppy, ZIP and other bootable
23 >> > things. You may want to check and see if you have the same thing.
24 >> > Mine
25 >> > is called "hard disk boot priority". I'm not sure this will help but
26 >> > it couldn't hurt to check I guess.
27 >>
28 >> The first device to try is my HD and as alternative I can only select the
29 >> CD drive anyway (which is deactivated). At boot time I can still switch
30 >> into a boot menu of the BIOS to select something else.
31 >
32 > This will not affect the order the Linux kernel will identify and label
33 > the devices.
34 > It will only affect where the BIOS will look for boot-code.
35 >
36 > Simply put, the following happens when a PC boots:
37 >
38 > 1) BIOS goes through its self-check
39 >
40 > 2) BIOS looks for boot-code on the devices it found in the order
41 > configured in the BIOS (BIOS -Boot Order)
42 >
43 > 3) BIOS runs boot-code
44 >
45 > 4) boot-code starts the boot-loader (GRUB)
46 >
47 > 5) GRUB loads kernel into memory
48 >
49 > 6) starts kernel
50 >
51 > 7) kernel detects drives and assigns them names in order of finding them
52 >
53 > At this point, it goes wrong as the drivers are not always identified in
54 > the same order. From what it looks like, on the OPs system, the
55 > USB-subsystem is scanned before the SATA-controller.
56 > The easiest solution to this problem would be to ensure that the
57 > USB-subsystem is not scanned before the boot-device is identified by the
58 > kernels boot- process.
59 >
60 > This can be achieved by configuring the USB-mass-storage support as a
61 > module.
62
63 This is what I did now and it seems the only setup that actually brings back
64 my root on sda3.
65
66 > Another option would be to patch the kernel to either support Labels
67 > natively or to have it include a "scan harddisks in following order:...."
68 > option which lists which harddisk-drivers (sata/ide/usb) are scanned and
69 > in which order.
70
71 Yep. Maybe LABELs are supported in future ... it would definitely improve
72 the situation.
73
74 Tanks for your help,
75 hJörg

Replies

Subject Author
[gentoo-user] Re: Changing boot device with 2.6.36 walt <w41ter@×××××.com>