Re: hard disk nomenclature
2008/10/27 L. V. Gandhi <lvgandhi@gmail.com>:
> I have P5GC-MX motherboard which has on one IDE hdd slot and two SATA HDD
> slots. I have installed primary IDE DVD drive, secondary IDE IDE HDD 80GB
> and Primarty SATA 160GB SATA HDD. BIOS shows as
> FIRST IDE MASTER DVD
> FIRST IDE SLAVE 80GB IDE DRIVE
> THIRD IDE PRIMARY MASTER 160 GB SATA HDD
>
> Debain ETCH shows 80GB IDE Drive as hdb and 160 GB SATA drive as sda.
> KUBUNTU 0710 shows 80GB IDE Drive as sda and 160 GB SATA drive as sdb.
>
> I would like to be enlightened why this happens.
Hey,
As of Ubuntu 7.04 they have a unified their disks as sdX for both IDE
and SATA which is why the 80GB IDE drive is now showing up as a sdX
device. As to which becomes sda and which is sdb that is now AFAIK
considered to be 'luck' as Ubuntu is moving towards parallel detection
which does not guarantee detection order. This is possible as they
now use UUIDs to identify all the filesystems: i.e. instead of
'/dev/sda' it would be more like
UUID=b1f711c3-e86b-4d63-a14f-ec2e2f377a12. IIRC Grub has recently
added support for UUIDs too which helps removes reliance on BIOS' disk
ordering also.
Ubuntu is based on Debian but is a much faster moving distribution.
Debian Etch is now several years old and being a stable release no
major changes like this would be pushed into it. I haven't looked
into it as yet, but If Debian follows the same path then at the very
least these changes will not appear until a future release (lenny,
sid, squeeze, etc).
Hope that helps,
Cheers,
Owen.
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