[NTLUG:Discuss] hard drive madness |SOLUTION

[Jay Urish]

Chris Cox wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 
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I discoverd a file I had missed before.. /etc/mtab

After editing that, I rebooted with the new drive in the system and it 
came right up..