[K12OSN] Swapping out a PATA for a SATA

[Terrell Prude' Jr.]

Carl Keil wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> I'm running my k12ltsp server off a single PATA drive.  I just bought 
> a SATA II drive which my mobo also supports.  I know how to install 
> the PATA II and move the /home directory to it, but I'm wondering if I 
> should just use the SATA alone, or run SATA for the boot drive and put 
> /home on the PATA.  What would you do given the choice between these 
> drives?
> Also, I don't have the time/energy right now to 
> reinstall/reconfigure.  I'm leaning heavily towards just putting /home 
> on the new SATA and seeing what kindof performance gain I get.  BUT 
> I've got to wondering.   Is it even possible to install the SATA and 
> copy the PATA to it and then reboot and be in business off the SATA 
> drive?  If so, what's the procedure?

If you don't want to reinstall, then go ahead and use the SATA II drive 
for /home.  The reason is as follows.  Yes, you can indeed copy the 
entire contents of that existing PATA drive to the SATA drive (cat or dd 
are both good for this), thus entirely replacing the PATA drive.  
However, you also will then have to tweak /etc/fstab to point everything 
from /dev/hdaX to /dev/sdaX.  If you don't do it right, you get a kernel 
panic (can't find the root partition).  Also, generally speaking, you've 
got to verify that all the drivers for SATA (this includes the generic 
SCSI driver, BTW, since SATA is seen as SCSI) are present in either the 
kernel itself or in the initrd; modprobe's not good enough at 
boot-time.  I believe that this is already the case for K12LTSP, so you 
*should* be OK in that way.

Now, if it were me, I would simply put /home on the new SATA II drive 
and go on with life.  It's just way easier.  Also, your performance will 
increase somewhat overall, since now you're spreading the workload 
across two physical spindles and sets of read/write heads.

--TP