Grub problem with SATA drives

[Hadders]

Pedro Bezunartea Lopez wrote:
> Tim wrote:
>   
>>> You, now, have two SATA drives plugged in at the same time? For
>>> interest's sake, what happens if you swap their data connectors
>>> around? I would have expected something like that to be the solution.
>>>       
>
> Thanks Tim. Yes, I have both drives plugged in at the same time. I haven't
> tried to swap the connectors yet. I wanted to have the new disk be sda
> because the old disk is failing and will probably be replaced soon, so I
> didn't want to have the new disk changing from sdb to sda when the bad
> disk fails. In any case, what would that test accomplish? it'll probably
> swap linux, and grub drive names.
>
> Hadders wrote:
>   
>> Umm, I think you'll find the problem goes deeper than that. When you did
>> a fresh install, the other drive didn't exist.
>> So Fedora LABELLED your new partitions the SAME as the old disks.
>>     
> (...)
>   
>> That will list all the paritions. sda is Port 0 on the mainboard, sdb is
>> Port 1 You can then type e2label /dev/sda(x) where x is the number
>> corresponding to your linux partitions.
>> This will simply LIST the volume labels
>> You should only have ONE root (/), so to relabel it, the command is the
>> same, but with the new label on the end, e.g e2label /dev/sda3 / will
>> relabel parition 3 as root (/)
>> Hope that helps
>>     
>
> Thanks Hadders, that was one of the problems which I already fixed by
> changing the grub.conf file so it doesn't use the LABEL parameter: kernel
> /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2849.fc6 ro root=/dev/sda5
>
> More details:
> The disk sda is plugged in the SATA 2, and sdb in the SATA 1 (!!) of the
> mainboard.
> Mainboard: QDI K8V800 VIA K8T800 VT8237 chipset
> CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor
> RAM: 1GB
> >From dmesg I get the following for SATA:
> scsi0 : sata_via
> ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
> ata1.00: ATA-7, max UDMA/133, 156301488 sectors: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
> ata1.00: ata1: dev 0 multi count 16
> ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
> scsi1 : sata_via
> ata2: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
> ata2.00: ATA-6, max UDMA/133, 156301488 sectors: LBA48
> ata2.00: ata2: dev 0 multi count 16
> ata2.00: configured for UDMA/133
>
> And from cat /proc/scsi/scsi
> Attached devices:
> Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
>   Vendor: ATA      Model: ST380211AS       Rev: 3.AA
>   Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 05
> Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
>   Vendor: ATA      Model: ST380013AS       Rev: 3.18
>   Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 05
>
> The disk connected at scsi0 (ATA-7) is sda, and the one connected to scsi1
> (ATA-6) is sdb.
>
> I'm not sure which information is relevant to make sense of all this.
> Thanks again,
>
> Pedro.
>
>
>
>   
As a side note did you jump the SATAII disk to be SATAII mode or SATAI? 
I know that my Seagate disks can jumpered by default to run in SATAI

Places to check for names include, /boot/grub/grub.conf (root=) and 
/etc/fstab.
Also I found recently that the initrd has a reference to names and swap 
in there too
You can unpack your initrd and look at the init file for those. (where 
initrd-xxx.img is the name of the current booting initrd)
 >mkdir /tmp/myinitrd
 > cp /boot/initrd-xxxx.img /tmp/myinitrd/theinitrd.img.gz
 > gunzip /tmp/myinitrd/theinitrd.img.gz
 > cpio -i --make-directories < /tmp/myinitrd/theinitrd.img
 > less /tmp/myinitrd/init
If you do want to make changes
 > rm /tmp/myinitrd/theinitrd.img
 > cd /tmp/myinitrd/
 > find . | cpio -o -c | gzip -9 > /boot/mynewinitrd.img
Then change grub to point to this, rather than overwriting the other one 
(for now)