[NTLUG:Discuss] hard drive madness

[Chris Cox]

Jay Urish wrote:
> Ok, this is chapping my hyde.
> 
> My K9 server has a 4 disk RAID array. When its the only "drive" in the 
> system, Mandriva gives it /dex/sda
> 
> If I add  SATA hard drive, the new drive gets dev/sda and the bootable 
> RAID gets pushed to /dev/sdb
> 
> This renders the system unbootable. I can fire up a rescue CD, mount my 
> partition under /mnt and go edit lilo.conf and fstab to reflect the 
> letter change but the system still wont boot. I did run lilo after the 
> change but it still seems like its trying to talk to /dev/sda after the 
> change.
> 
> 
> Am I missing a file somewhere? Can I make the RAID array on the 3ware 
> controller stay on /dev/sda while all new drives go higher 
> /dev/sdb,sdc,sdd etc?

Possibly.  One of the problems is booting.  So as long at your RAID has the only active boot area, you'll be fine.  The second issue is the kernel
line where the root file system has to be identified.  You can build an initrd with your RAID driver built into it as the first element and see if
that cures that issue.

Many distros have a mkinitrd command that helps in the building of the initrd.  It's an intrinsic part of most distros, so it's likely to be there in
your grub already (assuming grub).

In openSUSE/SUSE there's a variable in /etc/sysconfig/kernel called INITRD_MODULES where you'd put your RAID driver... just make sure it goes in
before the drivers for other disks (e.g. ata_piix, etc... will differ from platform to platform).

On some distros something like root=LABEL=/ work on the kernel line in your grub menu... but that assumes you're using a label taggable filesystem.
That might be a workable alternative as well.... just limits the filesystems you can use.