2.6.4 & SATA & SCSI - Which drive is which device?

Takker

Hi again!

I'm writing this post on my P4 (3,0 HT Northwood, Asus P4P800) machine with a SATA drive included.

I installed it some weeks ago using Knoppix because of the fantastic autodetecting features. Everything worked fine. SATA was /dev/hde.
But it took me hours to search the gentoo forums to get things running with my own compiled kernel, a 2.6.3-r1 gentoo-dev-sources. I had this "VFS cannot open root device" error. Just search for it ... there are hundrets of threads listed here

The solution was of course very easy: In 2.6.3 there was this SCSI-SATA support. This made my SATA drive not hde .. it became sda!
It's described in any topic in detail, I'm sorry I cannot find the URL right now.
After editing the lilo.conf and fstab everything worked fine for me.

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Of course I want to use the 2.6.4 now. A friend told me that this kernel version doesn't really need the SCSI-SATA drivers (which you can find in "Device Drivers -> SCSI device Support -> SCSI Low Level Drivers -> Serial ATA (SATA)" support btw) and not using this SCSI stuff even increases performance.

Well, what do you think about that? True, false?

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But the main question is: How can I find out which drive is which device while booting a kernel? This would make things much easier. I had enough of those "testing and getting VFS kernel panic"-hours

Takker · Posted: Wed Mar 17, 2004 8:04 pm Post subject:

Oh I've btw found the posts referring to that problem:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=145826&highlight=vfs+kernel+panic+root+sata

last Post

Takker · Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2004 1:09 pm Post subject: Nobody?

Nobody knows an answer to the question above??

-----------------------------------------

As a few ppl wrote me a PM about how I installed gentoo on my Asus P4P800 ... well, some general things:

-> I used KNOPPIX instead of any Live CD. I guess the actual Live CDs do support SATA and the chipset as well as KNOPPIX did, but KNOPPIX has in fact a nice autodetect ... and what's really great: You have a running Xserver and can use Konqueror or whatever you like instead of Lynx. That's very comfortable.
If you have a router to dialup things are even easier.

Of course you can scroll back in your KDE Shell Sessions, Copy and Paste, use a mouse, listen to a cd/mp3, watching a movie while installing (GREAT!!). All those lovely things.

-> Make Menuconfig does a really good job. In fact I had not to change major things to make it running.

-> I used the gentoo-dev-sources, ~x86 masking. This is the gentoo way, I think. ATM I'm using 2.6.3-r2.

-> Disable framebuffer and those settings. My suggestion is: Make it run first, then play around, BUT HAVE ALWAYS BACKUPS!

-> I enabled (or well let me say make menuconfig did) the "Device Drivers -> SCSI device Support -> SCSI Low Level Drivers -> Serial ATA (SATA)" settings. REMEMBER: As I wrote above this makes your SATA drive become "sda" instead of "hda".

-> Make Menuconfig enabled the Hyperthreading stuff (smb). I didn't play around with that stuff yet. Don't even know if Hyperthreading is running. Remember my philosophy

[edit]
As cat /proc/cpuinfo displays 2 procs I guess this may run. Gotta search for some benchmarking stuff later

[edit]

-> make.conf: There are several other threads dealing with the best settings for the CFLAGS etc. I use these settings:

Gelfling · Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2004 10:17 pm Post subject:

Interesting .config, I didn't see anything on the framebuffer support, This is currently a big pain in my arse. I have a Radeon 9800XT and I keep getting blank screens when I boot up my machine cause I don't have the framebuffer properly set up. So I've taken the machine apart to do a motherboard swap and I will try again but I would appreciate it very much if someone could tell me which is the proper framebuffer to select in the kernel config for my videocard. I also like having the smaller text appear on the screen as it boots up like on the livecd. I tried vga=0x317 and vga=795 with no success. I'm using kernel version 2.6.3-gentoo-r2.
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Phanbox64: MSI K8N Neo2, AMD Athlon64 3500+, ATI Radeon 9800XT, Corsair TwinX1024-3200C2 1024MB SDRAM, 2 WD 74GB Raptors & 120GB SATA HD, Audigy2 ZS, Plextor PX-708A DVD-/+RW, Pioneer DVD-106S DVD-ROM, CoolerMaster WaveMaster Case

Jowilly · Guru Joined: 22 Jun 2002 Posts: 319

Takker · Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 8:15 am Post subject:

I'm using framebuffer now (wanted to make things run first without). Don't know which one, sorry.
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takkahz.de
Gentoo Tips & Tricks

Gelfling · Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 9:12 am Post subject:

Okay, I'll try recompiling the kernel to use vga instead of vesa.
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Phanbox64: MSI K8N Neo2, AMD Athlon64 3500+, ATI Radeon 9800XT, Corsair TwinX1024-3200C2 1024MB SDRAM, 2 WD 74GB Raptors & 120GB SATA HD, Audigy2 ZS, Plextor PX-708A DVD-/+RW, Pioneer DVD-106S DVD-ROM, CoolerMaster WaveMaster Case

Obz · Retired Dev Joined: 11 Jun 2002 Posts: 274

Not sure if this is solved above, or you guys have figured it out, but I ran into the same trouble installing on my new WD SATA drive (previous IDE drives died on me).

During the LiveCD installation, the SATA drives are _not_ run through the SATA and SCSI layers. They're just run through the normal IDE layer, and hence, appear as hde on the 865/875-style motherboards (where hda,hdab,hdc,hdd are the ATA drives, and hde and hdf are the SATA drives). Think of that as running 6 normal hard drives on 4 channels.. if that makes sense.

However, during kernel config, if (like me) you enabled SCSI and SATA support in your kernel (2.6 kernel anyway), on boot, the SCSI layer will grab the device first and place it as sda (or sdX if you have other SCSI drives).

The way I did it was run lilo with hde as the boot, and hdeX (your root) as the root device. On the boot screen enter: <kernel-name> root=/dev/sdaX (where X is again, your root).

So for mine this was

linux-2.6.6 root=/dev/sda5

Make sure your fstab reads

Takker · Posted: Tue May 25, 2004 6:50 am Post subject:

Hi.

Indeed we got this "sdx not hdx" Problem solved.

Does anybody know what's the right name for grub? I want to switch from Lilo, grub auto-completion is not that helpful.
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takkahz.de
Gentoo Tips & Tricks

tdm · Posted: Sun May 30, 2004 5:39 pm Post subject:

I'm not 100% shure but as far as I know the right name SATA/SCSI devices with grub is:
(sdx,x) instead of (hd0,0)

I think I have seen it in `man grub` somewhere..
Hopes it helps.. mine P4 with HT is comming soon for me to play with

MasterC · Posted: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:43 am Post subject:

Thank you! I just completed a bootstrap using the NPTL thread, and rebooted and was stuck. Ran a search for udev, sata, lilo and found this thread first. It worked like a champ, and I am now enjoying my new system. Thanks again!

Cool