Translating /dev/xxx to Grub hdxxx, yyy

[Peter Jones]

On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 16:19 -0700, Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX N2469R wrote:
> In my odyssey to install FC4 64 on my Asus P5GD1 mobo,
> I installed Suse 9.3 DVD on the system.  Installation went
> without a hitch - no fooling around with where to put the
> loader, etc.  That is the good news.
> 
> The bad news is, Suse sets the SATA drive to hd0 according
> to the Grub config file.  So apparently the grub drive mapping is
> different between FC4 and Suse.

So you're saying one of us gets it wrong, I guess?  Which one (or is it
both), and what's your setup like in terms of what disk controllers are
plugged in where, what disks are plugged in to which controllers, what's
the BIOS boot order, what are the PCI IDs of the controllers, and what
does /sys/firmware/edd look like once you've done "modrobe edd" as root?

> So how does one translate from /dev/xxx as spoken by Disk Druid
> to grubspeak???

Er, one doesn't.  /etc/device.map exists to provide grub with a
translation, not the other way around; we create it during installation.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that on x86 machines there's
currently not a reliable way to detect the BIOS boot order.  So both we
and Novell/SuSE use heuristics, and sometimes they're going to be wrong.

-- 
        Peter