Install question: IDE devices not at usual places.

[kds]

Hello, I'm attempting my second Gentoo Linux installation and ran into something I thought was strange. I am trying to install Gentoo 1.2 on an Athlon machine with 2 IDE hard drives. Things proceed fine until I try to partition my drives with fdisk. In the past, when I have used fdisk, I always used 'fdisk /dev/hda' to partition my first drive, but when I try this now it tells me that I will not be able to write the partition table, and it seems as if my drives aren't there. I did 'fdisk -l' and it showed me my drives, including their partitions, but they were named in a way that I was not familiar with. The first partition on the first drive is named like this:

/dev/ide/host0/bus1/target0/lun0/part1

OK, so aside from being harder to type/remember than /dev/hda1, these names do seem to work. I was able to partition my drives with fdisk, create filesystems, and mount them, but at every step i was forced to use the name above rather than the names i'm used to. I looked in /dev and saw that hda was in fact a link to '/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/cd'. Same with /dev/hdb except it is target1. /dev/hdc and hdd seem to be linked to my hard drives, and I tried 'fdisk /dev/hdc' and it did indeed bring up the partition table for my first hard drive. The part that is troubling me is that I've installed other Linux distributions on this machine in the past and they've always identified the 2 hard disks as hda & hdb and the 2 CD drives as hdc & hdd, which agrees with the way I have it cabled. So my question is, why would my CD drives and hard drives seem to suddenly swap places, and is there any reason to be concerned about it? If I have something wrong I would much rather fix it before I continue with the install process then find out its going to cause me a problem later.

Thanks in advance for any help,
Karl

[neeyo]

If your motherboard has a built-in RAID/ATA100 controller, and your hard drives are on that, then whenever you boot off of a floppy or cdrom, your regular IDE system will take preference, and then the RAID/ATA100/Whatever drives will be listed.

However, when you boot off the ATA100, THEY will take preference and become hda + hdb ... annoying.

If you don't have one of those, ignore my statement.

[kds]

Thanks for the info. I do have an onboard ATA100 controller. The other machine I've put Gentoo on didn't, so I guess that's why I didn't see that behavior there. So if I understand correctly, whichever bus ( if that's what its called ) of the IDE controller is used for booting will have its devices listed first. So after install when I boot from HD then my devices will switch back. Then as long as I have my fstab entries correct all should be well?

again, thanks for the reply.