Hi Joost, J. Roeleveld wrote:
> On Friday 07 January 2011 09:47:28 Jörg Schaible wrote: >> Hi Dale, >> >> Dale wrote: >> > Jörg Schaible wrote: >> >> that approves my tests ... :-/ >> >> >> >> Had to boot this morning 5 times, since the root device switched >> >> arbitrarily between sde3 and sdg3 and I've chosen by bad luck always >> >> the wrong one. It seems there is also some timing involved regarding >> >> the initialization of the available devices ... sigh. >> >> >> >> - Jörg >> > >> > I had to reboot last night and was in my BIOS looking for other things >> > but did notice this feature. I have a setting in my BIOS that tells it >> > what drive to look for to boot first. It's above the part where you >> > tell it to boot CDROM, hard drive, floppy, ZIP and other bootable >> > things. You may want to check and see if you have the same thing. >> > Mine >> > is called "hard disk boot priority". I'm not sure this will help but >> > it couldn't hurt to check I guess. >> >> The first device to try is my HD and as alternative I can only select the >> CD drive anyway (which is deactivated). At boot time I can still switch >> into a boot menu of the BIOS to select something else. > > This will not affect the order the Linux kernel will identify and label > the devices. > It will only affect where the BIOS will look for boot-code. > > Simply put, the following happens when a PC boots: > > 1) BIOS goes through its self-check > > 2) BIOS looks for boot-code on the devices it found in the order > configured in the BIOS (BIOS -Boot Order) > > 3) BIOS runs boot-code > > 4) boot-code starts the boot-loader (GRUB) > > 5) GRUB loads kernel into memory > > 6) starts kernel > > 7) kernel detects drives and assigns them names in order of finding them > > At this point, it goes wrong as the drivers are not always identified in > the same order. From what it looks like, on the OPs system, the > USB-subsystem is scanned before the SATA-controller. > The easiest solution to this problem would be to ensure that the > USB-subsystem is not scanned before the boot-device is identified by the > kernels boot- process. > > This can be achieved by configuring the USB-mass-storage support as a > module. This is what I did now and it seems the only setup that actually brings back my root on sda3. > Another option would be to patch the kernel to either support Labels > natively or to have it include a "scan harddisks in following order:...." > option which lists which harddisk-drivers (sata/ide/usb) are scanned and > in which order. Yep. Maybe LABELs are supported in future ... it would definitely improve the situation. Tanks for your help, hJörg
