Subject: Re: How to force a (SATA) drive to be sda and the PATA one, sdb

[R. G. Newbury]

Alfredo Ferrari wrote:

Thanks a lot for the answer. I tried to work with the initial ramdisk, I
managed to edit the init and, sigh, there is no ide module loaded,
apparently the libata + ata_piix do both PATA and SATA in recent kernels,
so apparently there is no obvious way to get the disks in the "right"
order. Googling a bit I found other people complaining that PATA's are
recognized before SATA's now... so I am still with my problem.
Labels are fine for ext3 partition and no automount, while I have Windows
partitions as well, and a lot of partition with automount (just because
the second disk is there sometimes yes sometimes no)
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Well, I'm glad to know that I',m not the only one hurting...although my 
problem was the opposite way round. A PATA drive which I wanted to boot 
from, and 2 SATA drives as data drives. This on Fedora 8 rc2.

I was eventually able to get the BIOS of the motherboard, an ASUS P5L-MX 
to recognize things in the correct order, but (and this is why I have 
commented) it ALSO took installing the SATA drives on sockets 2 and 4 of 
the four SATA connectors..

Apparently the SATA connectors are paired: #1 is a MASTER, #2 a SLAVE, 
#3 a MASTER and #4 a SLAVE. By mounting the PATA drive as the PATA IDE 
MASTER (and the CDROM as Slave) the system saw ONLY the one master 
driver....Which is a good thing, as the data drives are not bootable!.

But it did take more than a couple of reboots into the BIOS, and 2 
'break-ins' to box, before I figured that out. Symptom was that one data 
disk was visible, and one not. Swapping cables at the drives, swapped 
the problem. Swapping cables at the mb, swapped the problem..so I 
figured that the mb socket was bad..tried another socket. Success.

Then, of course, and only then, did I find the Manual!....

Geoff