Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 307321
PATA, SATA and SCSI in Fedora
Last modified: 2009-03-27 09:32:32 EDT
INCLUDE CHAPTER, SECTION, AND SPECIFIC DETAILS HERE PLEASE. 8. Upgrading 9. Partitioning 10.4 Advanced Boot Loader Options Fedora 7 introduced the new "feature" to handle both PATA and SATA disk drives with libata which maps all drives (PATA and SATA) into SCSI devices /dev/sdXN. If you have a single drive or single type of drive in a system, then this change is pretty transparent. However, if you have a mix of PATA and SATA drives on a system, then it is possible (likely?) that drive ordering (what is sdaN, sdbN, sdcN, etc.) will be re-ordered from what it would be on a previous sytem with /dev/hdXN mapping. This was not addressed in the Fedora 7 guide nor is it addressed in the Fedora 8 guide and I believe that it should be specifically addressed to minimize confusion. The "solution" turns out to be simple -- change the "boot ordering" under the Advanced Boot Loader Options. However, what is not obvious is that the device mapping will change when the install system is booted from what was seen during install (anaconda). For example, I have a system with a single PATA drive and a single SATA drive. During install, the PATA drive (which was formally /dev/hda) is /dev/sdb and the SATA drive (which was /dev/sda) is /dev/sda. Selecting reordering and installing the boot loader on /dev/sdb5), everything installs. When I reboot, the system has the PATA drive as /dev/sda and the SATA drive as /dev/sdb. I do not have a system with two PATA drive and a SATA drive so I do not know how that would map. In any case, I believe that the guide should address these issues.
Anaconda maintainers -- I have no systems available in my home with mixed PATA/SATA so I can't test this in any way. Does the anaconda device detection differ from boot time device detection in a way that this situation can still occur?
Still occurs with Fedora 9
There is a paragraph that appears to roughly cover this area in bootloader.xml Think we can close this given this content? <para> You may also need the advanced options if your <abbrev>BIOS</abbrev> enumerates your drives or RAID arrays differently than &FC; expects. If necessary, select the <guibutton>Change Device</guibutton> button and expand the <guibutton>BIOS Drive Order</guibutton> selection within the Boot loader device dialog to set the order of the devices in &FC; to match your BIOS. </para>
The information we've requested above is required in order to review this problem report further and diagnose or fix the issue if it is still present. Since it has been thirty days or more since we first requested additional information, we're assuming the problem is either no longer present in the current Fedora release, or that there is no longer any interest in tracking the problem. Setting status to "CLOSED: INSUFFICIENT_DATA". If you still experience this problem after updating to our latest Fedora release and can provide the information previously requested, please feel free to reopen the bug report. Thank you in advance.