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. 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. -- Joost
