I have been juggling systems and removed a CDROM drive from my Debian machine. I also had to replace the motherboard but don't think that's the issue here.
Now when I reboot the scsi controller sees the scsi drives on both its channels (its an Adaptec 3940 which has two channels). Debian seems to reset the controller successfully on both channels but the boot up fsck reports that three of my drives aren't there as ext2 filesystems. I'm pretty sure they're all on the same (second) channel and that that's the channel where the cdrom came out so I'd like to think the explanation is that removing the cdrom has thrown the mapping from scsi device ids to /dev mounts. I can't get into the machine to check documentation and I can't see enough detail in "Running Linux" to know if this is the case and, if so, how to fix it. However, that does read as if linux scans through the scsi devices allocating /dev/sda /dev/sdb etc sequentially rather than hard mapping to a scsi id. If so, maybe removing the cdrom has thrown the mapping and I should be able to get in as root and hack the mapping (is it in /etc/fstab?) and correct the problem. (Seems odd as it allocates cdroms and rw drives separately but ...) If not, what's happening?! I can't see that there's likely to have been a major destruction of the file system on all three drives particularly given that the controller verifies them happily! _ANY_ hints, help, thwacks over the head for stupidity gratefully received. Chris Chris Evans, R&D Consultant, Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust
