Anne Wilson wrote:
Are there any issues as to where the OS is, on such a mixed-drive setup? I ask because windwave seems to want something that I have been considering - adding a SATA drive to an existing PATA installation.
Yes. Most SATA support is through a SATA device driver which either needs to be built directly into your kernel, or a module pre-loaded through your initrd image. I recently added 2 SATA drives to my already running PATA system. Since I was still booting with my hda drive as my boot drive, I didn't have to change anything. I just made sure that the sata_nv driver was included in my initrd, and when I booted, linux found my SATA drives. I have since moved my root partition from /dev/hda2 to /dev/sdb2. Now, I still boot from /dev/hda, and I have told grub that my root is on the new disk drive (hd2, 1).
I have not yet solved the magic incantation to get my BIOS to boot from the SATA drive first. I also don't know what my disk map will look like when I do. I had enough trouble moving my root partition and getting grub to do the correct thing from my rescue disk before that I put off doing the final step (and possible removing the last PATA disk from my system).
Anne
YMMV, but hopefully, not much.