cooker-ppc  

note on Dual G4 benh install vs. rescue ultra-ATA device

Isaac Csandl
Mon, 03 Nov 2003 12:21:58 -0800

A few months ago, I was having trouble with the Ultra-ATA drive in a dual G4 
tower. The 9.1 system would install, but not boot. Eventually I gave up and 
moved the HD to the "normal" ATA bus on the motherboard. The drive won't show 
up at all in the normal mdk kernels, smp or enterprise, if it's connected to 
the Ultra ATA bus. 

But recently I figured out what seems to be a strange quirk. The Ultra drive 
shows up as /dev/hde when you boot the rescue CD with 'install-gui-benh 
rescue text video=ofonly', but when I booted the machine from the HD with the 
benh kernel, it shows up as /dev/hda. Odd.

On the HD, I've installed the recent benh kernel from Mandrake Club, version: 
2.4.21-1bh-mdksmp, which is working well (it feels as fast as before, 
although only one CPU shows in gkrellm -- i'm curious if this is correct, but 
content that it works for now... thoughts, anyone?).

I just thought I'd share the experience in case anyone else bumps into this 
problem, because I wasted a lot of time editing /etc/fstab and 
/etc/yaboot.conf (and doing the accompanying chroot, mount /proc, ybin 
procedure in rescue mode) to change everything to /dev/hde, before figuring 
out what was happening, that it should be /dev/hda, not /dev/hde.

--i