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Re: Hard Drive hdb becomes hdf !!!



On Sat, Mar 03, 2007 at 04:21:18PM -0500, Thomas H. George wrote:
> I built a new computer with two hard drives and installed XP Home 
> Edition on the first drive.  The second drive contains my Debian system 
> - kernel 2.6.17 and Testing.  I intended to use disc 1 of a Sarge 
> installation set as a rescue disk to access hdb and run lilo to convert 
> this box to a dual boot box.
> 
> boot: rescue=/dev/hdb5 failed.
> 
> During the load
> 
>    "Partition Check
>       hdd
>      hde: hde1
>      hdf: hdf1,hdf2 < hdf5, hdf6, hdf7, hdf8 >"
> 
> so I tried.
> 
> boot: rescue=/dev/hdf5
> 
> which stopped with
> 
>    "Warning: Unable to open and initial console
>      Kernel Panic: No init found.  Try passing an init= option to the 
> kernel"
> 
> I don't know why the letters changed and what init option I should use.  
> The hard drives are master and slave on ide 1.  There are two 
> connectors, ide 1 and ide 2 on the motherboard.
> 
> The motherboard is KA3 MVP and the processor is an AMD Athlon 64 3800.
> 
> (Note: Only the Debian Sarge disc knows what's out there.  My Knoppix 
> CD, my bbc-2.1 CD, my Damn Small Linux CD and two Debian boot floppies 
> all fail.)
> 
> How can I regain access to my Debian system?
> 
Most computers with ide on-board can use 4 hd's: hda,hdb,hdc,hdd
if you have a second ide card, it uses hde,hdf,hdg,hdh
so somehow your machine is seeing hdb as hdf. The way I found to fix
this is to use 'labels'. They specify the disk without using 'changing'
identifiers.
if you use a live cd or similar and type:
ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/
it will show the 'id' label and what it points to:
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-QUANTUM_FIREBALLlct15_20_613025126527-part1 -> ../../hda1
so if I used /dev/hda1, I'd replace it with /dev/disk/by-id/ata-QUANTUM_FIREBALLlct15_20_613025126527-part1 
Its a bit longer, but if I move the disk hda to hdb, the 'by-id' will
still find it.
So read up on lilo or grub about the syntax.

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