And now I have managed to get a workable install, using a USB stick.
However, even this is not easy. If there's a standard way around this
problem, perhaps someone can let me know. The problem is that the installer
regards the USB memory stick as /dev/sda. This is the first hard disc in the
system, as there weren't any IDE discs in the system. Consequently, when
grub comes to set things up (devices.map and menu.lst) its idea of the
device names is wrong for the reboot scenario when the USB stick is no
longer there. The first install I tried failed because of this, indeed, I
think GRUB wrote the MBR back onto the USB stick so the stick had to be
recreated as well. Second time, I worked around this to some extent by
editing these two files and also removing the USB stick before GRUB could
write on it. Even so, at boot time, the system couldn't find its swap, which
was still wrongly labelled (as /dev/sdb5). Fortunately, you get a chance to
change this so I could boot the system. I then searched for all instances of
file containing /dev/sdb5. There are two text files whose names I have now
forgotten, as well as /etc/fstab but also the name seems to be inside the
kernel and some other binary files. Even after changing all the text files,
a reboot still wanted to get the wrong swap. This system was using the
2.6.24 kernel, but after an upgrade the 2.6.25 kernel appeared. The
grub-update process again screwed up and put /dev/sdb everywhere in menu.lst
(I would love to know where it got this name from, as it wasn't in any text
file on the system other than installation logs). But, I fixed menu.lst to
refer exclusively to /dev/sda instead, after which a reboot using the 2.6.25
kernel worked without incident. I haven't tried rebooting back into the
2.6.24 kernel.
I would like to put the IDE disc back into the system, but I don't think I
can, as I expect the system will assign it to be /dev/sda (AFAICS 2.6.25 no
longer uses /dev/hd devices at all), and I won't be able to boot the system.
Is there any way to get around this automatic assignment of hardware to
devices, and in particular to force the device from which I'm going to boot
to have a fixed name in /dev?
Jon Thackray
+44 1223 572299
+44 7803 017991
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