Disk controller detection order

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Hi Chris,

I have an old machine with SCSI disks on an adaptec controller and
recently added three SATA disks with a promise SATA controller add-on
card. With this machine I have the same issue. The machine boots off
the SCSI disk and sees this as sda, while during the installation it
assigns sda/sdb/sdc to the three SATA disks and sdd to the SCSI disk.

I believe that somehow controller detection in the installation kernel
and the installed kernel is not in the same order.

Rather than taking everything apart and trying to build a new
installation initrd or whatever is needed I changed the kicktart file
for this machine to install to sdd, which will be sda again after the
installation

||bootloader --location=mbr --driveorder=sdd
||
||clearpart --all --drives=sdd
||part /boot   --ondisk=sdd --size=120  --asprimary  --fstype ext3
||part pv.00   --ondisk=sdd --size=8192 --grow

Maybe this approach works for you as well if you know which machines
need this hack.

Cheers,

Kurt

On Mon, Aug 04, 2008 at 03:41:17PM +0100, Christopher Mocock wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Using revisor, I've composed a respin which uses my custom kernel 
> package. Most of the systems I'm installing to have an IDE drive of 
> 40-80GB and a bunch of SATA disks, either directly connected to the 
> motherboard or via a 3Ware RAID card.
> 
> My kickstart has something like the following:
> 
> zerombr
> clearpart --all --drives=sda
> part /var/log --fstype ext3 --size=120 --ondisk=sda
> part / --fstype ext3 --size=10000 --ondisk=sda
> part swap --size=128 --grow --maxsize=256 --ondisk=sda
> 
> So everything should get installed to sda, which I would hope would 
> always be the first IDE disk. However, I'm finding that if I install to 
> a system which has a 3Ware RAID card, the OS gets installed to the first 
> SATA disk on the 3Ware. The %post script in my custom kernel rpms finds 
> the UUID of /dev/sda1 by running /lib/udev/vol_id -u /dev/sda1 and then 
> puts it as the root= parameter in grub.conf.
> When I then try to boot from my new installation, the system boots from 
> the IDE disk, since that is configured as the first boot device in BIOS.
> 
> Any ideas as to how I can reliably persuade anaconda that /dev/sda is 
> the primary master IDE device rather than picking up the 3Ware SATA 
> drives first?
> 
> I noticed there's a --onbiosdisk option, but the docs don't make clear 
> what this parameter should be.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -- 
> Chris
> 
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